In my latest National Post column I caution aboriginal militants against putting forward apparently insatiable demands in an insensitive, arrogant tone.
“Do you know that disease and death must needs overtake us, no matter what we are doing?... What do you wish to be doing when it overtakes you?... If you have anything better to be doing when you are overtaken, get to work on that."
Epictetus, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go
“It is natural to civilised man to go back upon his past, and to be grateful for all profit he can gain from the study of his own development. So we may be certain that the claim of Greece and Rome to our eternal gratitude will never cease to be asserted, and their right to teach us still what we could have learnt nowhere else will never be successfully disputed.”
W. Warde Fowler Rome (written November 1911)
In my latest National Post column I say the horrific fire in London's Grenfell Tower happening in public housing is a powerful warning against putting too much faith in government.
“It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it."
Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in Cormac McCarthy No Country for Old Men
"Looking for fish? Don’t climb a tree."
Chinese proverb (according to "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe and Mail March 31 2011