In my latest National Post column I say we won't get helpful answers on the Toronto mass shooting unless we ask the right questions.

"I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven’s sake. What’s the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge?"

The heroine in J.D. Salinger Franny and Zooey, quoted by Edward Tingley in First Things January 2002

"A wise man hears one word and understands two."

"a Yiddish proverb" quoted in BC Report December 28, 1998

"One science only will one genius fit/ So vast is art, so narrow human wit."

Alexander Pope, quoted in Marshall McLuhan The Gutenberg Galaxy 

"'Do you believe in God, Winston?' ‘No.’ ‘Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?’ ‘I don’t know. The spirit of Man.’ ‘And do you consider yourself a man?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors.'"

O'Brien and Winston Smith in George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four