“Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.”

Max Beerbohm quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #5 (March 2006)

“the Roman empire is afflicted rather than changed – a thing which has befallen it in other times also, before the name of Christ was heard, and it has been restored after such affliction – a thing which even in these times is not to be despaired of.”

Augustine City of God

In my latest National Post column I say Remembrance Day is not a pacifist occasion, even on the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War. (On which, and on the meaning and impact of World War I generally, see again The Great War Remembered on YouTube or in my online store.)

“Economic systems come and go like fashions in surgery and in the clothes of women, and during the nineteenth century the Mercantile System was discarded in favour of a system of free and open competition. At least, so I have been told.”

Hendrick Van Loon The Story of Mankind

“people often ask me, well don’t you have faith in anything? And I always have the same answer, I do have one unshakable [faith], and that is I have an unshakable [faith] in the unreliability of man. I know that no matter what we do, some damn fool will make a mess of it.”

Garrett Hardin, quoted in Julian Simon Hoodwinking the Nation