“The study of history brings to youth the experience that is lacking to it; it can help the adolescent to overcome his most usual temptation: to be exclusive, to condemn in advance some particular tendency, person, or group; to have a vision of the universe limited only to his own vision (and if only this were a matter merely of adolescents!). At the age when it is important to confront the values received – those of his surroundings, childhood, family, or social milieu – with his own personality, the study of history would enlarge the field of this investigation… By familiarizing oneself with other times, other eras, other civilizations, one acquires the habit of distrusting criteria of one’s own time…”

Régine Pernoud, Those Terrible Middle AgesPernoud TMA p. 170.

In my latest National Post column I reflect on how far modern race- gender- and even youth-obsessed identity politics progressivism has fallen in the United States from Martin Luther King Jr.’s inspiring vision of judging people by character not skin colour.

“What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic order? On certain familiar assumptions the answer is simple enough. If we possess all the relevant information, if we can start out from a given system of preferences, and if we command complete knowledge of available means, then problem which remains is purely one of logic.... This, however, is emphatically not the economic problem which society faces.”

Friedrich Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review, 35 (January 1945)

"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