"The smarter you are, the smaller your strike zone."

"Anonymous" quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail November 4, 2010

"always brilliant, sometimes intelligent"

Robert Bourassa's frequently stated verdict on Bernard Landry, quoted by Paul Wells in National Post November 29, 2000

“How could man have such utter contempt for man? Because he had reached the point of contempt for God. Only a godless ideology could plan and carry out the extermination of a whole people."

John Paul II at Yad Vashem, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things October 2000

"Unpleasantries exchanged"

TSN announcer regarding a little shoving match (no fight resulted) in Toronto Maple Leafs - Minnesota North Stars game November 1, 1993

If tearing down statues of historical figures because they don't entirely meet contemporary standards worries you, come hear author Bob Plamandon and others (including me) at a Hands Off Our History barbeque this Sunday, Sept. 9, at Ottawa's Andrew Haydon Park starting at 3:00.

For details visit https://www.facebook.com/mycanadaincludesmyhistory/

“Talking about pumpkins doesn’t make them grow."

Dr. Maketsi in Alexander McCall Smith The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

In my latest National Post column I say the deep ideas the government solicited about preserving the welfare state regardless of what it actually does or what's going on around it seem to miss the point.

In lecturing to R.A.F. members during World War II “It seemed to me that they did not really believe that we have any reliable knowledge of historic man. But this was often curiously combined with a conviction that we knew a great deal about prehistoric man: doubtless because prehistoric man is labeled ‘science’ (which is reliable) whereas Napoleon or Julius Caesar is labeled as ‘history’ (which is not). Thus a pseudoscientific picture of the ‘caveman’ and a picture of ‘the present’ filled almost the whole of their imaginations; between these, there lay only a shadowy and unimportant region in which the phantasmal shapes of Roman soldiers, stagecoaches, pirates, knights-in-armor, highwaymen, etc., moved in a mist. I had supposed that if my hearers disbelieved the Gospels, they would do so because the Gospels recorded miracles. But my impression is that they disbelieved them simply because they dealt with events that happened a long time ago: that they would be almost as incredulous of the battle of Actium as of the Resurrection – and for the same reason.”

C.S. Lewis, The Grand Miracle