"Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up for work."
"U.S. artist Chuck Close" quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail August 19, 2008
"I allow that, if no Supreme Ruler exists, wise to form and potent to enforce the moral law, there is no sanction to any contract, virtual or even actual, against the will of prevalent power. On that hypothesis let any set of men be strong enough to set their duties at defiance, and they cease to be duties any longer.”
Edmund Burke An Appeal from the Old to the New Whigs
"a hotbed of cold feet."
George Will in National Post October 9, 2001 (a complicated metaphor applying to U.S. Senate Democrats over Iraq in 1991 what was said of "All Souls College, Oxford at the time of the 1956 Suez crisis")
"It grieves them more to own a bad house than a bad life…"
St. Augustine The City of God (speaking of "evil men")
"history is above all concrete and particular, not general and abstract…. the thoughts and deeds of once living beings.”
Jacques Barzun From Dawn to Decadence
"it is axiomatic that one cannot have a duty to do something that cannot be done."
George Will in Washington Post August 17, 2003, quoted in Natan Sharansky with Ron Dermer The Case for Democracy
In my latest National Post column I say liberal reactions to actual diversity tend to be unfavourable, suggesting that their theoretical devotion to it simply confuses debate.