“Our concern is with the search for truth. A religious belief can do all sorts of things for us – it can sustain us in life and in the approach of death; it can provide a thread of meaning in what would otherwise be a labyrinth of inanity – but it cannot do these things with integrity unless it is founded on the truth. I have great sympathy with David Pailin when he says that ‘Attempts to defend theism by ignoring the question of truth… are fundamentally atheistic. They worship human wishes rather than ultimate reality.’... The religious believer wishes to be found in the company of honest inquirers and not of polemicists for a cause.”

John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist

“the humor of unleavened dough, the charm of a bag of cement, and the tact of a Mack Sennett rubber mallet.”

Frank Capra The Name Above the Title [the specific reference is to a Colonel in the Signal Corps that Capra was at one point obliged to deal with]

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the reason public officials pivot ataxically from one certainty to another on SARS-CoV-2 (yes, that’s the virus) is that the public won’t accept that the government doesn’t have all the answers.

“In order to please a selfish politician, Lincoln had signed an order transferring certain regiments. Stanton not only refused to carry out Lincoln’s orders but swore that Lincoln was a damn fool for ever signing such orders. What happened? When Lincoln was told what Stanton had said, Lincoln calmly replied: ‘If Stanton said I was a damned fool then I must be, for he is nearly always right. I’ll just step over and see for myself.’ Lincoln did go to see Stanton. Stanton convinced him that the order was wrong, and Lincoln withdrew it. ”

Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

“If it’s all the same to history, it need not repeat itself any more.”

“Bob Edwards Calgary Eye Opener May 31, 1919” quoted in Ottawa Citizen September 30, 1998

In my latest National Post column I say David Suzuki’s thinly veiled threat of violence if he and his sanctimonious ilk don’t get their way, in defiance of lawful authority and popular consent, reflects a persistent mentality on the left.

“An economic model of behaviour that lays any claim at all to predictive power must rely on the uniformity of human nature summarized in Homo economicus, or economic self-interest objectively defined. Such a model has served economists well; the model in all its variations explains much of what we know about the political-governmental sphere of human action in addition to the much more that we know and can explain about human action in market relationships… [and] yields meaningful predictions…”

“Constitutional revolution in Democracy” in Geoffrey Brennan and James M. Buchanan The Reason of Rules: Constitutional Political Economy

In my latest Epoch Times column I say a new Cardus/Angus Reid survey showing Canadian youth “leaders” want to tear civilization down and start again suggests that they are right to feel that they have been cheated though very wrong about how.