“As the classical writers knew – Aristotle knew it, Cicero knew it, Thomas Aquinas wrote of it with great insight – the virtues are interconnected. People are confused about this fact because a person who is full of vices might have some admirable qualities. As a man I knew who was sentenced to prison for embezzling put it, ‘You meet some of the nicest people in prison.’ But the interconnection of virtues doesn’t imply that we can’t possess even a particle of virtue unless we possess complete virtue. What it does imply is that there is no such thing as a person who fails in just one virtue. Anything wrong in one moral dimension does damage in the other ones too.”

J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” April 17, 2023 [https://undergroundthomist.org/antipasto]

In my latest Epoch Times column, I challenge Pierre Poilievre’s maddeningly vague belligerence on Bill C-63 and just about every other issue.

In my latest National Post column, I say Western leaders’ calls for Israel not to retaliate for Iran’s blatant act of war amounts to “Free hits on Jews” and is disgusting, cowardly and a recipe for disaster.

“No one can invent new values or a new morality. What appear to be new ones are merely the results of cherry-picking elements of the ‘old’ morality, exaggerating them, and ignoring all of its other elements. This was [C.S.] Lewis’s great insight.”

J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” May 8, 2023 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/things-i-had-to-learn]

In my latest Epoch Times column, I advise Canada’s hapless foreign minister on dealing with real, actual, menacing tyrants who don’t share her amorphous woke attitudes.

“To give the appearance of doing wrong, when it could have been avoided, is to do wrong. This used to be called the sin of scandal, but we have misappropriated that useful word and put it to different purposes.”

J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” May 8, 2023 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/things-i-had-to-learn]

“For an aristocracy is always progressive; it is a form of going the pace. Their parties grow later and later at night; for they are trying to live to-morrow.”

G.K. Chesterton What’s Wrong with the World

“In the old days, they founded nations (Moses, George Washington) or saved them (Nelson at Trafalgar). Because of their grand stature, they had grand flaws. The greater the man, the greater his perversity, says the Talmud (I translate loosely).”

Rick Salutin in Globe & Mail June 10, 2005 [on “heroes”].