“I got an invitation from Carleton University’s College of the Humanities and College Anniversary Committee to a 10th anniversary celebration with a lecture from professor Roy Mottahedeh of Harvard on ‘Pluralism in Non-Western Traditions: the Case of Islam’ which added (generically) ‘Your presence will enrich this momentous occasion for us.’ And I thought ‘Sorry, I’m having my leg pulled that night.’”

One of mine, from September 15, 2006

In my latest Loonie Politics column I again protest restrictions on free speech during elections, and Canadians’ willingness to tolerate them.

“At dinner he [Nero Wolfe] started on automation. He has always been anti-machine, and on automation his position was that it would soon make life an absurdity. It was already bad enough; on a cold and windy March day he was eating his evening meal in comfortable warmth, and he had no personal connection whatever with the production of the warmth. The check that paid the oil bill was connected, but he wasn’t. Soon, with automation, no one would have any connection with the processes and phenomena that make it possible to stay alive. We would all be parasites, living not on some other living organisms but on machines, arrived at the ultimate ignominy. I tried to put up a stiff argument, but he knows more words.”

Archie Goodwin’s internal monologue in Rex Stout A Right to Die

In my latest Epoch Times column I warn that what benefits citizens and what benefits politicians is often different, and as rational utility maximizers politicians will dependably choose the latter if we let them.

“The laymen who scoffed at Einstein’s general theory of relativity because space could not be ‘curved’ – it was not that sort of thing – were not simply wrong or mistaken. Nor were the mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers who tried to develop a Euclidean version of Einstein’s theory. What had previously been meant by space was necessarily flat, homogeneous, isotropic, and unaffected by the presence of matter. If it had not been, Newtonian physics would not have worked. To make the transition to Einstein’s universe, the whole conceptual web whose strands are space-time, matter, force, and so on, had to be shifted and laid down again on nature whole. Only men who had together undergone or failed to undergo that transformation would be able to discover precisely what they agreed or disagreed about. Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial. Consider, for another example, the men who called Copernicus mad because he proclaimed that the earth moved. They were not either just wrong or quite wrong. Part of what they meant by ‘earth’ was fixed position. Their earth, at least, could not be moved. Correspondingly, Copernicus’ innovation was not simply to move the earth. Rather, it was a whole new way of regarding the problems of physics and astronomy, one that necessarily changed the meaning of both ‘earth’ and ‘motion.’ Without those changes the concept of a moving earth was mad. On the other hand, once they had been made and understood, both Descartes and Huyghens could realize that the earth's motion was a question with no content for science.”

Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition

“As long as I can look myself in the mirror and know that I am working as hard as I can, doing what I believe is right for the country, that is how I get through, and that is what I believe I am doing.”

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the end of a frenetic and disastrous electoral campaign, quoted in National Post July 4, 2024 [he also said he had a “clear conscience” so the fact that the election was a disaster for him, his party and his nation apparently did nothing to dent the fact that he felt splendid about himself]

“As the psychologists explained, one of the things that makes incompetents incompetent is an inability to recognize the difference between competence and incompetence.”

David Frum in National Post Jan. 22, 2000 [with reference to a study at Cornell finding that those who did worst on a grammar test rated themselves best]

“‘The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.’”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Donald Morrison, ed. Mikhail S. Gorbachev: An Intimate Biography (apparently Gorbachev cited it in a speech).