In my latest National Post column I say people who want a government strategy for every problem lack faith in the creativity and decency of human beings especially including Canadians.
“As a profession, we have made a mess of things. It seems to me that this failure of economics to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with our general propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences, an attempt which in our field may lead to serious error…. If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire that full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible.”
Friedrich Hayek in his speech accepting the Nobel Prize in Economics, quoted in Brian Lee Crowley The Road to Equity
“King of Swamp Castle: When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built one all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what you’re going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England.”
Monty Python and the Holy Grail quoted on www.imdb.com
“Genius is eternal patience.”
Michelangelo (widely attributed online though I haven't seen any reference to where exactly he said it)
Walter Pater’s “Renaissance, Oscar Wilde told his friend William Butler Yeats, was his own ‘golden book… the very flower of decadence.’ Pater’s aestheticism, however – the cultivation of experience, sensuality, passion, the exotic – although possessing an obvious affinity to the decadents, had a high seriousness, even an ultimate sense of morality, that was lacking in the decadents.”
Gertrude Himmelfarb The De-moralization of Society
“I have only one fault, namely, that I am evil.”
Another “Needhamism” from the then-just-deceased columnist Richard J. Needham, quoted by Malcolm MacLeod of St. John’s in letter to the Globe & Mail July 30, 1996
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say those who sweep aside the rule of law through vandalism, personal violence and other forms of “direct action”, regardless of their cause and its legitimacy, have succumbed to the deadly sin of pride.