“While men perform their social duties faithfully, they do all that society or the state can with propriety demand or expect; and remain responsible only to their Maker for their religion, or modes of faith, which they may prefer or profess.”
George Washington in W.B. Allen Compiler and Editor George Washington: A Collection.
“A consultant, we are advised, is a man who knows a hundred ways to make love and doesn’t have a girlfriend.”
Val Sears in Ottawa Sun December 16, 1998
In my latest Mercatornet column I say people are having trouble grasping the dynamics of the American election because they’re reluctant to face the truth that both Trump and Biden were terrible candidates, and Harris might be almost as bad.
“Do not try to rescue someone who does not want to be rescued.”
Tweet by Jordan Peterson January 16, 2024 [https://x.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1747332137882431572]
“We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and the inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born.”
Roger Scruton, emailed by a friend and widely quoted online
In my latest National Post column I warn that because ideas have consequences, and a powerful internal logic, progressive organizations that start with apparently non-controversial causes tend to slide into radical craziness, as with Ottawa’s Capital Pride that’s being boycotted even by Justin Trudeau because it’s so pro-Hamas and can’t stop itself.
In my latest Epoch Times column I remind people of Milton Friedman’s key insight that the real burden of government is what it spends, not the various devices from taxation to borrowing to printing money that it uses to fund, and often conceal this scope of, its activities and ambitions.
“When it [Queen’s University] opened its first classes in 1842, its first professor, the Reverend Peter Colin Campbell, taught classical literature. In its Memorial Room to the school’s war dead, there is an inscription around the wall, from Wordsworth, another provocative conditional: ‘We must be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold which Milton held.’”
Joseph Brean in National Post January 26, 2024 [heckling the way Queen’s was handling its funding crisis].