In my latest National Post column I argue against making the tax code even more complicated and unfair by extending charitable status in pursuit of social engineering.

"Thinking is loyalty to truth."

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News May 27, 2011, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 16 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2013)

"You can’t pick plums in a desert."

Detective Nero Wolfe in Rex Stout Plot it Yourself

"A wise observer has said that young people will give their lives for an exclamation point, but they will not give their lives for a question mark."

Richard John Neuhaus in First Things #169 (Jan. 2007)

"This study is an attempt to tell them that, not only is the Emperor naked, but his body is hardly a thing of beauty."

William Stanbury in Fraser Forum August 1998 [the actual topic was CanCon regulations, but the statement is apt surprisingly often]

"When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned to horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o’clock. We must answer that it is magic. It is not a 'law,' for we do not understand its general formula...."

G.K. Chesterton in “The Ethics of Elfland” in Orthodoxy quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #3 (Nov.-Dec. 2007)

"People will not look forward to posterity who will not look backward to their ancestors."

Edmund Burke
 

Especially in his speeches and lectures Ludwig von Mises "would emphasize again and again that interventionist policies are 'wrong,' not from the point of view of the economist himself, but from the point of view of those initiating these policies (or at least from the point of view of those whose well-being the policies are supposed to enhance)."

Israel M. Kirzner in Edwin G. Dolan, ed., The Foundations of Modern Austrian Economics