"Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news."

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News January 27, 1923, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 # 4 (Jan./Feb. 2001)

In my latest National Post column I say the Prime Minister isn't being inconsistent or confused about allegedly groping a reporter 18 years ago; he's consistently denying the existence of truth.

"As a schoolboy, I would supplement my English lessons by buying and reading The Morning Star, a foreign English-language newspaper that was available in the USSR. The Soviets permitted us to read this Communist daily published in London because, in being very critical of the democratic and capitalist world, the paper parroted the ideological line of the party. For me, however, its effect would prove highly subversive. What left a lasting impression was not the content of the criticism but the very fact that people outside the Soviet Union were free to criticize their own government without going to prison. The stronger the criticism, the more impressed I was by the degree of freedom enjoyed elsewhere."

"Preface" 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.

"tough as goat guts"

Former New York Times editor Howell Raines (of his predecessor James Reston), quoted by Robert Fulford in National Post March 26, 2004

“The main thing is never to act against your conscience, not to put your signature on documents you do not believe in, not to vote for those who you think should not be elected, not to approve decisions, not to applaud, not to pass on lies, not to broadcast them, not to write them, not to put them down on paper, not to pretend … Let your creed be 'Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph, but not through me.'"

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn "Live not by the Lie" quoted by Ian Hunter in National Post August 5, 2008

"Public thinkers such as politicians and members of the media who comment on them are the first generation of our society to have been badly schooled without being aware of the fact."

"Mad Intelligence” in George William Rutler He Spoke to Us