In my latest Epoch Times column I use Neil Winokur’s book The Grumpy Accountant to lament that Canada’s tax system has been outrageously and needlessly complicated and harsh for many decades. Why do we let them do it to us?

“Once the memory of the past grows dim, we will forget who we are and why we exist as a people. Poised ready to relish the pleasure of the moment, without regard for how we became a free society, we risk losing all.”

Solveig Eggerz in Joseph Baldacchino Educating for Virtue

“‘The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please,’ wrote Edmund Burke, the hero of American conservatives, ‘we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations.’”

David Frum Dead Right

“Even a paranoid can have enemies.”

Henry Kissinger, cited by Michiko Kukutani, “Bound by Suspicion,” The New York Times Magazine, January 1, 1997 and requoted in Quotes, Notes and Anecdotes (The Write File Quarterly) Spring 1997

“The important thing is not to win but to take part.”

The refounder of the Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin, quoted in Maclean’s Dec, 7 1992

“Surely what matters in a dogma – religious, political or any other kind – is not the motive of those who advance it, but whether it is true or false.”

Ted and Virginia Byfield in “Orthodoxy” in British Columbia Report August 18, 1997

“Saying the problem with a major government intervention wasn’t socialism but bad pricing decisions is like saying the Hindenburg was a success except for the fire.”

Here I quote myself from June 3, 2002 in reaction to former Energy Minister Marc Lalonde making some such excuse about the National Energy Program

“‘I disagree,’ John Keats once wrote in a letter, about the world as a ‘vale of tears... Call the world, if you please, “the vale of soul-making.” Then you will find out the use of the world.’”

Thomas Boswell, How Life Imitates The World Series