In my latest Mercatornet piece I argue that Australians, too, owe their firmly grounded self-government to the long and often violent struggle for liberty throughout the English-speaking world. (On which see also, of course, my documentaries on Magna Carta and the Right to Arms.)

"If you make an ass out of yourself, there’ll always be someone ready to ride you. Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory."

Bruce Lee, Striking Thoughts

"There’s no such thing as a bad day when there’s a doorknob on the inside of the door".

Paul Galanti, former Navy Commander and Vietnam War POW, quoted in National Post March 24, 2003

"To suppose that this universe came into existence, with you and me in it, in order that we might, in Shakespeare’s felicitous phrase, 'grind out our appetites', is not only to demean life, but to make it farcical as well."

Malcolm Muggeridge, "Address, 1970" in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge

"They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn. It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the stair-case and was viscid under the foot like organic matter."

O. Henry in “The Furnished Room”

An excellent Mercatornet piece by Margaret Harper McCarthy on how religious freedom must mean far more than the right to indulge certain opinions in private, reprinted from Humanum Review.

In my latest National Post column I say the proliferation of political "fake news" is party due to a proliferation of fake news everywhere.