“Thomas Aquinas… did, with a most solid and colossal conviction, believe in Life; and in something like what Stevenson called the great theorem of the livableness of life.”
G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas: “The Dumb Ox”
“The history of mankind is an immense sea of errors in which a few obscure truths may here and there be found.”
Cesare de Beccaria (a.k.a. Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria, Marquis of Gualdrasco and Villareggio), quoted in Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, The Peter Principle
In my latest National Post column I explain how anyone who actually wants to have a sensible conversation on guns not a shouting match, or a virtue-signalling festival, could go about it.
“Human beings can control their own acts, but not the consequences of their acts to themselves or to others. Society can subject the distribution of wealth to whatever rules it thinks best: but what practical results will flow from the operation of those rules, must be discovered, like any other physical or mental truths, by observation and reasoning.”
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, quoted in Thomas Sowell, Classical Economics Reconsidered
In my latest Epoch Times column I say Patrick Brown’s claim to be a “pragmatic” conservative actually means voters have no idea what he would do if elected and neither does he… like an amazingly long line of political figure prone to boasting of their mental and moral hollowness..
“Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.”
Martin Luther King Jr., quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email Jan. 18 2022; other online sources attribute it to “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” (31 March 1968) (for instance https://quotepark.com/quotes/723559/history/)
“After all, what would life be without fighting, I should like to know? From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man. Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts and habits in himself, or spiritual wickedness in high places, or Russians, or Border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them. It is no good for Quakers, or any other body of men to uplift their voices against fighting. Human nature is too strong for them, and they don’t follow their own precepts. Every soul of them is doing his own piece of fighting, somehow and somewhere. The world might be a better world without fighting, for anything I know, but it wouldn’t be our world; and therefore I am dead against crying peace when there is no peace, and isn’t meant to be. I am as sorry as any man to see folk fighting the wrong people and wrong things, but I’d a deal sooner see them doing that, than that they should have no fight in them.”
Thomas Hughes Tom Brown’s Schooldays
“There is a kind of God-shaped hole in many people’s lives…”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist