“If the word of the Lord stands forever, why do so many Christians discount the Old Testament Scriptures? They may be Scriptures, but we discount them. They have been dumped into the half-off bin at the back of our scriptural storehouse. Actually, they’re in the front of the Bible, but for many of us, they’re in that unused, unread portion. Mentally, we have moved them to the back forty. They have become the back forty-four – out of sight and out of mind. But the words of Psalm 119 break into our mind.”

David Kitz Psalms Alive!

“A man who looks as though he’s been raised by wolves”.

Val Sears in the Ottawa Sun February 24, 1999 (about Peter Gzowski, who he liked)

“Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot/ That it do singe yourself.”

Shakespeare, quoted in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

“For it is the nature of the many to be ruled by fear rather than by shame, and to refrain from evil not because of the disgrace but because of the punishments. Living under the sway of their feelings, they pursue their own pleasures and the means of obtaining them, and shun the pains that are their opposites; but of that which is fine and truly pleasurable they have not even a conception, because they have never had a taste of it.”

Aristotle Ethics

In my latest National Post column, I say the Prime Minister’s real problem in fighting to keep Enbridge 5 open is that he actually believes fossil fuels are worse than useless.

“I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.”

Charles Dickens, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail June 20, 2000

“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking the compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give.”

Joan Didion Slouching Toward Bethlehem

“Gentlemen, listen to me slowly.”

One of “Still More Samuel Goldwynners” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #1 (September 2005)