In my latest National Post column I predict the policies the federal Tories will endorse in Halifax this weekend.

“No one is exempt from talking nonsense; the misfortune is to do it solemnly.”

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

“The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.”

Elliot Carver (the villain) in the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies

“Darwin himself, asked about the implications of his theory for religion and morality, replied that while the idea of God was ‘beyond the scope of man’s intellect,’ man’s moral obligations were what they had always been: to ‘do his duty.’ Leslie Stephen, after abandoning the effort to derive an ethic from Darwinism, finally confessed: ‘I now believe in nothing, but I do not the less believe in morality.’ George Eliot uttered the classic statement of this secular ethic when she said that God was ‘inconceivable,’ immortality ‘unbelievable,’ but duty nonetheless ‘peremptory and absolute.’”

Gertrude Himmelfarb The De-moralization of Society

“uncooperation”

What a police officer said he was getting from hostile people during an investigation, on a news program on Channel 16 in Vancouver March 29, 1992.

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say there's nothing wrong with what the Trudeau administration tweeted about Saudi repression; it wasn't some utopian overreach to remake the world, just a statement in favour of the Canadian value of freedom.

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."

Mahatma Gandhi
 

"the present occupies almost the whole field of vision. Beyond it, isolated from it, and quite unimportant, is something called 'the old days’ – a small, comic jungle in which highwaymen, Queen Elizabeth, knights-in-armor, etc. wander about. Then (strangest of all) beyond the old days comes a picture of ‘primitive man.’ He is ‘science,’ not ‘history,’ and is therefore felt to be much more real than the old days. In other words, the prehistoric is much more believed in than the historic.”

C.S. Lewis, The Grand Miracle, describing the attitude of "the uneducated Englishman" of his day.