“The reasonable people (for I know some quite reasonable people who allow me to talk to them), the rationalists, the liberal progressive people all say, ‘The Indian need is Independence; it must be a self-governing unit,’ and so on. Then they both say, ‘Let us hope no silly squabbles about religion will spoil this great unity,’ whether Imperial or National. Now I am so perverse that I think the religious squabbles are much less silly than the political squabbles. I am much more certain that there is such a thing as Islam than there is such a thing as India. I believe much more in the existence of a Hindoo than in the existence of an Indian. And I think the difficulties do arise from the doctrines; but much more from the trick of ignoring the doctrines.”

G.K. Chesterton in “The Thing They Left Out” in the New York American January 9, 1932 reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

In my latest Epoch Times column I urge people to put aside small-minded, defeatist, timid claims that practically speaking Canada can only have the bad muddled policies it currently does, and write down what they really think is wrong and what they really think would fix it.

In my latest National Post column I discuss the very good reason Israelis made a very bad deal.

“Ideas and values, not location or weather, were what distinguished the Greeks.”

Victor Davis Hanson The Wars of the Ancient Greeks

In my latest Epoch Times column I mocked progressive alarm at Jordan Peterson daring to interview Pierre Poilievre, and at either man daring to exist. But I then expressed my own alarm at the way Poilievre makes plausibly right-wing noises without articulating genuine policy alternatives on major issues.

“We relax at the ranch [in California] which, if not heaven itself, probably has the same zip code.”

Ronald Reagan in a 40th wedding anniversary tribute to his wife Nancy in 1992, quoted in National Post June 7, 2004

“Kings needed help or counsel or money. They wanted assent to their policies and political support for them. These obvious facts should indeed receive due emphasis in any institutional history of the Middle Ages, but it is a delusion to suppose that, by merely calling attention to them, we are providing a sufficient explanation for the rise of medieval constitutionalism. The problem of maximizing assets to governmental policies arises for all rulers in all societies. It is not normally solved by the development of representative assemblies. Our argument is not that hard-headed medieval statesmen behaved in such-and-such a way because some theorist in a university had invented a theory saying that they ought to do so. The argument is rather that all men behave in certain ways in part at least because they adhere to certain ways of thinking. No doubt the ideas that are most influential in shaping actions are ones that the agent is hardly conscious of at all – he takes them so much for granted. But the historian has to make himself conscious of those ideas if he is to understand the men of a past age and the institutions that they created.”

Brian Tierney, “Medieval Canon Law and Western Constitutionalism,” in The Catholic Historical Review (Washington, April, 1966) excerpted in Bertie Wilkinson The Creation of Mediaeval Parliaments [and BTW Wilkinson was my grandfather].

“as difficult as leadership is, it is not complicated. In its simplest form, leadership is ‘accomplishing a task with the people and resources you have while maintaining the integrity of your institution.’”

Author’s “Introduction” to William H. McRaven The Wisdom of the Bullfrog