"There’s an ancient saying: 'The world would be a clean place if we each swept in front of our own doorsteps.'"

Ottawa psychotherapist Dawn Brown quoted by Linda Mondoux in Ottawa Citizen November 22, 2006

“One of the most eerie phenomena of our era, Eric Hobsbawm states in his masterful history Age of Extremes; The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, is the ‘destruction of the past.’ Most young people, he argues, now ‘grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in.’”

Sean Mills in The Beaver April-May 2005

In my latest National Post column I say it’s odd for people claiming to stand against Trump-style divisive politics to rant and rave about Doug Ford as a dictator trampling our rights.

By shopping at the local butcher who knew their names “we were personalizing commercial transactions, and, at the risk of sounding like a goony theorist, we were nurturing the economy of Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, the little patch of the planet where we lived, and over which we had been given responsibility because of our having chosen to be there. By ‘economy,’ I don’t mean strictly commerce, but the inchoate and complex system of human relations that bound us together as a community, and made Cobble Hill the kind of place worth living in and caring about…. And by choosing to shop at those places, we chose to conserve that rare and precious thing, a sense of beloved community, a sense of beloved place, in a world where the quest for efficiency and the monetary bottom line served only to annihilate tradition and atomize families and communities.”

Rod Dreher Crunchy Cons

“To question a wise man is the beginning of wisdom.”

“German proverb” e-mailed to me without attribution

“Winston had 10 ideas every day, only one of which was good, and he did not know which it was."

General Sir Alan Brooke, Winston Churchill’s chief of staff, quoted by John Keegan in National Post August 29, 2002

"If there are commands of God, then there must be rights of man."

G.K. Chesterton in “The Empire of the Insect” in What’s Wrong with the World, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 12 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2009).