"I don’t have a life, I have a life-style."

Dan Fielding on Night Court (I did not record the broadcast date)

In my latest National Post column I say it's time to leave Afghanistan and keep our powder dry and our morale up for the next challenge.

"I grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s, as part of a generation who were taught the minutiae of 'social history.' There was no wider context to put it in, no framework, no sense of a larger, grander picture. It was plodding and confusing and mind-numbingly dull. It was after I left school that I became interested in history as it is meant to be taught – as a story, as conflict and character, as cause and effect. My approach comes from my own 're-discovery' of Canadian history."

Will Ferguson in a Q&A in The Beaver October-November 2005

"As a profession, we have made a mess of things. It seems to me that this failure of economics to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with our general propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences, an attempt which in our field may lead to serious error…. If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire that full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible."

Friedrich Hayek in his Nobel Prize in Economics acceptance speech, quoted in Brian Lee Crowley Crowley The Road to Equity

In my latest National Post column I wish news stories would more often refer to government spending being cut, especially by contrast with the lurid and generally inaccurate "slashed".

"As we want a person to play for pleasure, we want him to think for pleasure."

G. K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Feb. 18 1928, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 16 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2013) p. 44.