In my latest National Post column I insist that, since Islam is a religion not a race, whatever concern about radical Islam might be it cannot be racism.
On August 24, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev stepped down as chairman of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It was something of a hapless performance. And in one sense, Gorbachev can and should be seen as a bumbler. But the most important thing about him was a fundamental decency that meant the end of communism was remarkably bloodless.
"newspapers are fond of referring to the ‘dust-bin of history,’ a notion they borrow not from Karl Marx, as they think, but from an English writer and member of Parliament, August Birrell. On inspection the bin is much less full than is commonly believed. The repeats and returns in the last five centuries have been frequent."
Jacques Barzun From Dawn to Decadence
"When the economic chickens come home to roost, they tend to arrive in flocks."
Editorial in National Post August 12, 2015
"It’s okay to say what you think as long as you have thought."
Brent Dyment (an "honourable mention" in a readers’ "Thought du Jour" contest in Globe and Mail Nov. 29 2002)
"Now there’s a man with an open mind - you can feel the breeze from here!"
Groucho Marx
"I know a man who has such a passion for proving that he will have no personal existence after death that he falls back on the position that he has no personal existence now. He invokes Buddhism and says that all souls fade into each other; in order to prove that he cannot go to heaven he proves that he cannot go to Hartlepool."
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy p. 344.