Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 70

Historical definition of a country's borders... "...here's where my murder geography ends and your murder geography begins, at least until I get more murderers to expand my murder-fest.
Stefan Molyneux
So why don’t Americans cheat? Because they think that their system is legitimate. People accept authority when they see that it treats everyone equally, when it is possible to speak up and be heard, and when there are rules in place that assure you that tomorrow you won’t be treated radically different from how you are treated today. Legitimacy is based on fairness, voice and predictability, and the U.S. government, as much as Americans like to grumble about it, does a pretty good job of meeting all three standards. Pg. 293
Malcolm Gladwell
You are constantly being trained to be heroic only in the service of your masters - only in slaughter and sacrifice and subjugation. But there is no heroism in serving your masters. Real heroism is questioning why you have masters at all.All these stories, all these fantasies, all these superpowers - are designed to steal heroism from you, to make it impossible, fantastical, remote, and unachievable - and make you useful to your masters (as a hit man, if needed). What is the opposite of this?The opposite of fantasy is philosophy. The opposite of mythology is integrity. And integrity is truth in action.
Stefan Molyneux
You cannot have an agency that defends your property, which also has the right to violate your property rights at will. That's like hiring a bodyguard that you pay to beat you up randomly.
Stefan Molyneux
Tyranny is the wolf cast by the shadows of sheep.
Stefan Molyneux
July 4, the day we celebrate giving our political masters independence from conscience, morality, consequences for evil doing, and basic social and economic reality.The fireworks are the glowing tears of your children's incinerated futures.Cheer happy slaves - your only chains are your deluded joys. Cheer and sing, because for you, songs of death are easier than questions of life.
Stefan Molyneux
Statism is an unnatural disaster.
Stefan Molyneux
Rights" are something made up by governments to make you feel like you're buying something with your taxes.
Stefan Molyneux
History is the same story with different costumes.
Stefan Molyneux
Ever wonder why the media never refers to 18 or 19 year old American soldiers as "armed teens"?
Stefan Molyneux
We've got this weird dysgenic situation where we're basically just paying idiots to breed and taxing intelligent people to stay away from each other with anything remotely resembling fertility.
Stefan Molyneux
As the American Patriots imagined it, a federal relationship would be a kind of confession of first principles or covenant that would allow states to bind themselves together substantially without entirely subsuming their sundry identities. The federal nature of the American Constitutional covenant would enable the nation to function as a republic – thus specifically avoiding the dangers of a pure democracy. Republics exercise governmental authority through mediating representatives under the rule of law. Pure democracies on the other hand exercise governmental authority through the imposition of the will of the majority without regard for the concerns of any minority – thus allowing law to be subject to the whims, fashions, and fancies of men. The Founders designed federal system of the United States so that the nation could be, as John Adams described it, a “government of law, not of men.” The Founders thus expressly and explicitly rejected the idea of a pure democracy, just as surely as totalitarian monarchy, because as James Madison declared “democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been violent in their deaths.” The rule of the majority does not always respect the rule of law, and is as turbulent as the caprices of political correctness or dictatorial autonomy. Indeed, history has proven all too often that democracy is particularly susceptible to the urges and impulses of mobocracy.
George Grant
The fact is, the primary way that Ottawa and Washington deal with Native people is to ignore us. They know that the court system favors the powerful and the wealthy and the influential, and that, if we buy into the notion of an impartial justice system, tribes and bands can be forced through a long, convoluted, and expensive process designed to wear us down and bankrupt our economies.Be good. Play by our rules. Don't cause a disturbance.
Thomas King
Statism ends with an eye roll.
Stefan Molyneux
If you have a really good ideas, one thing you dont need is a fucking gun. An iPad is a kind of a cool thing. They don't need to threaten you with fines to get you to buy one do they? The moment the government says they're gonna force you to do something, you know its a bad idea. If someone invites you on a date with chloroform, an old sofa, and a windowless van, it's not a date.So, the fact that ObamaCare, welfare state, military industrial complex, public schools - you name it. The fact that it has to be imposed at gunpoint is a clue that it's shit. Recognize that when there is a gun to your face, there is not a very advantageous human being on the other end.
Stefan Molyneux
What goes up, must come down." Well, Issac Newton's law doesn't apply to the internet. That's what people don't realize. When you put something up, as long as there is an internet there will be that same stuff. When you're a senior citizen, what you uploaded to Facebook at a high school party will still be there. Whatever you upload to the internet, no matter how strong your passwords and security are, guaranteed the government or some advertising corporation will look at what you post someday. The only law that applies to the internet is, "For every reaction, there is an equal and opposite reaction." Post a photograph and you'll get attention. Post your old scanned Kodak slides and family home movies, you'll get a nostalgia rush and you'll reunite people with better days. But post a bad thing, thinking you can go unnoticed, and you'll never be able to crawl out from underneath it.
Rebecca McNutt
be lawful for the Queen, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate and House of Commons, to make Laws for the Peace, Order, and Good Government of Canada
The British North America Act
Socialism, or communism as it is sometimes called, is merely a secular religion, where the State becomes a god.
Stefan Molyneux
States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one.
Steven Pinker
As an Auyana man living in New Guinea under the Pax Australiana put it, “Life was better since the government came” because “a man could now eat without looking over his shoulder and could leave his house in the morning to urinate without fear of being shot.
Steven Pinker
A breath of laughter will blow a Government out of existence in Paris much more effectually than a whiff of cannon-smoke
Robert Barr
It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that requires no such brutality and demands no such ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy -- like a national oil company -- held in state hands. It's equally possible to require corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of workers to form unions, and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state are reduced. Markets need not be fundamentalist.
Naomi Klein
Now listen to the first three aims of the corporatist movement in Germany, Italy and France during the 1920s. These were developed by the people who went on to become part of the Fascist experience:(1) shift power directly to economic and social interest groups;(2) push entrepreneurial initiative in areas normally reserved for public bodies;(3) obliterate the boundaries between public and private interest -- that is, challenge the idea of the public interest.This sounds like the official program of most contemporary Western governments.
John Ralston Saul
The idea that the State is capable of solving social problems is now viewed with great scepticism – which foretells a coming change. As soon as scepticism is applied to the State, the State falls, since it fails at everything except increasing its power, and so can only survive on propaganda, which relies on unquestioning faith.
Stefan Molyneux
The whole purpose of propaganda is to make the obvious seem obscure, or offensive
Stefan Molyneux
Whenever governments adopt a moral tone - as opposed to an ethical one - you know something is wrong.
John Ralston Saul
The law is an opinion with a gun.
Stefan Molyneux
That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.
Margaret Atwood
Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.
Laurence J. Peter
Realize that by hurting your own characters, you are not a sadist. You are not deliberately hurting your loved ones merely to watch them suffer. You’re giving a gift. You’re helping them grow and develop. Your characters take on deeper meaning to become more alive on your pages. They’ll become real.
James Chartrand
I am someone who has a cold heart. If I am beside a great grief I throw barriers up so the loss cannot go too deep or too far. There is a wall instantly in place, and it will not fall.
Michael Ondaatje
But if Crake wanted her to stay longer on any given night, do it again maybe, she'd make some excuse—jet lag, a headache, something plausible. Her inventions were seamless, she was the best poker-faced liar in the world, so there would be a kiss goodbye for stupid Crake, a smile, a wave, a closed door, and the next minute there she would be, with Jimmy.
Margaret Atwood
...I didn't want you flawless - I have a bare wall at home that's flawless - I wanted your character trapped in the amber of your skin...
John Geddes
...if you're an actor, and you've thought your way into the part, then you're character portrayal will have authority...
John Geddes
Life is swimming to shore with cowboy boots on.
Christopher G. Moore
The fact that God can bring character development and personal growth out of any situation is conditional on people's willingness to submit to God's will. God is sovereign over every life, but those who yield their will to him will be shaped according to his purposes. When God directs a life for his purposes, all of life is a school. No experience, good or bad, is ever wasted (Rom. 8:28). God doesn't squander people's time. He doesn't ignore their pain. He brings not only healing but growth out of even the worst experiences. Every relationship can be God's instrument to mature a person's character.
Henry T. Blackaby
Nearly every parent on earth operates on the assumption that character matters a lot to the life outcomes of their children. Nearly every government antipoverty program operates on the assumption that it doesn’t.
David Brooks
Angela Duckworth has shown how important grit and perseverance are to lifetime outcomes. College students who report that they finish whatever they begin have higher grades than their peers, even ones with higher SATs.
David Brooks
We are what we are because of what we've been
Jo Beverley
I make honorable things pleasant to children." A teacher from Sparta
David Brooks
To nurture your career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your moral core, it is necessary to confront your weaknesses.
David Brooks
You can’t build rich lives simply by reading sermons or following abstract rules. Example is the best teacher. Moral improvement occurs most reliably when the heart is warmed,
David Brooks
there was perhaps a strain of humility that was more common then than now, that there was a moral ecology, stretching back centuries but less prominent now, encouraging people to be more skeptical of their desires, more aware of their own weaknesses, more intent on combatting the flaws in their own natures and turning weakness into strength.
David Brooks
The inner struggle against one’s own weaknesses is the central drama of life.
David Brooks
It's not a person's depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.
Anne Michaels
In a science fiction novel, the world is a character, and often the most important character.In a mainstream novel, the world is implicitly our world, and the characters are the world.
Jo Walton
What a wise person teaches is the smallest part of what they give. The totality of their life, of the way they go about it in the smallest details, is what gets transmitted.
David Brooks
People with character are capable of long obedience in the same direction, of staying attached to people and causes and callings through thick and thin. People with character also have scope. They are not infinitely flexible, free-floating, and solitary. They are anchored by permanent attachments to important things. In the realm of the intellect, they have a set of permanent convictions about fundamental truths. In the realm of emotion, they are enmeshed in a web of unconditional loves. In the realm of action, they have a permanent commitment to tasks that cannot be completed in a single lifetime.
David Brooks
…I'm sorry, and a little dissatisfied as well. Miss Stacy told me long ago that by the time I was twenty my character would be formed, for good or evil. I don't feel that it's what it should be. It's full of flaws.' 'So's everybody's,' said Aunt Jamesina cheerfully. 'Mine's cracked in a hundred places. Your Miss Stacy likely meant that when you are twenty your character would have got its permanent bent in one direction or 'tother, and would go on developing in that line.
L.M. Montgomery
Was he a pleasant man hiding behind a mask of seeming carelessness or an unpleasant man hiding behind a mask of charm & smiles? Or like most humans, was he a dizzying mix of contradictory charactersticks?
Mary Balogh
Developing better people should be the number one goal for any coach when dealing with kids. In trying to develop better people, we are going to develop more and better pros.
Bobby Orr
Even water carves monuments of stone, so do our thoughts shape our character.
Hugh B. Brown
This next song is about when you get your heart broken and you try your best to glue it back together and you wake up one morning and you’re so happy because you realize, Oh my God, the tape’s holding!
Sara Quin
I don't want to know that you don't want me. I don't want to know what you do without me. I don't want to know what I'll be without you. I dont wanna know. I don't wanna know.
Sara Quin
I know I'll hold this loss in my heart forever. I know I'll hold, I'll hold. I know.
Sara Quin
I always say that anybody who’s single ― like Sara ― their love is the most intense love. The heartbreak they’re enduring is the most intense heartbreak. We cannot understand what Sara’s going through. When it’s love, it’s my love, you can’t understand it. You can’t compare. But I really related to where Sara was on this record. When she was writing these songs and coming to me like: You don’t understand, I was like: You’re right, but I also do.
Tegan Quin
One night I heard my dad say to my mom: I can't help but think of the good times we're having now as being painful memories later on. And my mom saying, c'mon now honey.
Miriam Toews
When I wrote this song I felt pretty unoriginal because everybody writes love songs, and everybody feels like their love is the most important and when their love ends and they get their heart broken, that nobody understands. And…that’s ridiculous, but so am I.
Tegan Quin
...the heart breaks in so many different ways that when it heals, it will have fault lines ...
John Geddes
How can you smile as though your whole life hasn't capsized
Michael Ondaatje