In my latest National Post column I call the availability of a genuine Stalin statue on e-Bay a reminder of a strange double standard about evil on the left.

"If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat."
St. Paul, 2 Thessalonians 3:10

“While some knowledge can be a good thing, sometimes too much is dangerous.”

Ontario Premier Mike Harris on why he filled key cabinet posts with people with limited relevant experience, quoted in The Write File Quarterly Issue #5, Summer 1995

"The main impulse of a true genius is not to look into himself, with endless digging into his conscience and subconscious - as Pasternak said, ‘conscience is like the headlights of a car; their light directed outward illuminates the way, directed inward leads to catastrophe’ - but to look out of himself. And to give. And if the main impulse of your existence is the desire to give, you cannot really be a nasty character. That’s what, probably, Pushkin had in mind when he exclaimed in his Mozart and Salieri: 'Genius and villainy are incompatible.'"

Chronicles magazine 1/88 [again I had regrettably not yet in 1988 acquired the habit of recording the author as well as publication when I recorded points I considered noteworthy]

“I find it enormously interesting that this approach [that the law is what the sovereign commands] to finding a replacement for a transcendental source of values involves, in effect, a redirection of metaphorical energy: to find a human equivalent for God, there is a focus not on God’s goodness, but on his Power. It makes sense.”

Arthur Allen Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” Duke Law Journal Vol. 1979 #6

"I know that you'd rather walk through a furnace in a gasoline suit than consider the possibility that John Kerry would lose Ohio."

“Rather’s Familiar Quotations” [Dan Rather] in The Atlantic Monthly March 2005