People From Montreal

"Of course it’s commendable that the UN would – albeit by a stunted majority – again pass resolutions that highlight gross human rights violations in North Korea, Burma and the Iran,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based monitoring group UN Watch."

"People in many Western countries with troops in Afghanistan may be alarmed to note that, after all the blood and treasure expended there to help that country build a democracy, it continues to vote with Iran in opposing the Western-led effort to denounce the Islamic Republic for ­– in the words of one of the resolution’s sponsors – a ‘continued deterioration’ in Iran’s human rights record."

"I am not the type of person who thinks in terms of "if only" or "could have, would have, should have". It is what it is and everything happens for a reason. When a person thinks "if only I would have known such and such" it shows a certain amount of fear or lack of trust that everything is as it should be. I try to always do my best and if I look back and think I didn't do my best, then that is the only thing I acknowledge and then try to change. One of my favorite expressions is, "Everything is okay in the end and if it's not okay, it's not the end.""

"Although I am not as strict a vegetarian as I once was, I do continue to choose to eat more like a vegetarian than not. I would call myself a "conscious eater". It all started with my desire to be as lean and healthy as possible as a teenager around 17-years-old. With more education, as well as trial and error, it also turned into an expression of my attempt to show compassion for all living things."

"Jacob Viner used to assign exam questions that showed how Ricardo’s Chapter 2 recognized (in modern parlance): P_2 / P_1 = \frac{\text{marginal cost in labour}_1}{\text{marginal cost in labour}_2} = \frac {1/\left[{\partial {Q}_/\partial{L}_}\right]}{1/\left[{\partial {Q}_/\partial {L}_}\right]} But, Viner insisted, this was compatible with rent’s being 99 per cent of national income and labour’s importance being derisory. Would that more historians of economic analysis had taken Viner’s EC 301 or brooded more on Ricardo’s text."

"A comparable error was made by Professor Jacob Viner in an important article on laissez-faire in Smith’s economics. He contrasted the mature realism of The Wealth of Nations with the youthful idealism of the Moral Sentiments, and quoted five passages from the ethical work as evidence for his view of it. The first of his quotations was in fact written for the far from youthful sixth edition."

"To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand."

"The earlier views, those of Hobbes or Locke for instance, saw language as an instrument, and understood meaning in terms of designation. Discovering the meaning of words is finding what ideas or things they stood for. ... By contrast, a hermeneutical view requires a very different conception. If we are partly constituted by our self-understanding, and this in turn can be very different according to the various languages which articulate for us a background of distinctions of worth, then language does not only serve to depict ourselves and the world, it also helps constitute our lives. Certain ways of being, of feeling, of relating to each other are only possible given certain linguistic resources."

"At most points in his discussion, however, Taylor speaks about true beliefs in a more familiar and restricted way. When he asks whether historians should take account of the fact that a particular belief is true when seeking to explain it, what he generally seems to be asking is whether we should take account of the fact that the belief in question accords with our own best current beliefs about the matter at issue."

"The natural tendency of the market is to increase the scope of the social relations that it covers, because entrepreneurs see opportunities at the edge to turn what is not yet a commodity into one. Left to itself, the capitalist dynamic is self-sustaining, and socialists therefore need the power of organized politics to oppose it: their capitalist opponents, who go with the grain of the system, need that power less (which is not to say that they lack it!)."

"Every market, even a socialist market, is a system of predation. Our attempt to get beyond predation has thus far failed. I do not think the right conclusion is to give up."

"Certain contemporary overenthusiastic market socialists tend, contrariwise, to forget that the market is intrinsically repugnant, because they are blinded by their belated discovery of the market's instrumental value. It is the genius of the market that it (1) recruits low-grade motives to (2) desirable ends; but (3) it also produces undesirable effects, including significant unjust inequality. In a balanced view, all three sides of that proposition must be kept in focus, but many market socialists now self-deceptively overlook (1) and (3). Both (1) and (2) were kept in focus by the pioneering eighteenth-century writer Bernard Mandeville, whose market-praising Fable of the Bees was subtitled Private Vices, Public Benefits. Many contemporary celebrants of the market play down the truth in the first part of that subtitle."

"I believe that certain inequalities that cannot be forbidden in the name of socialist equality of opportunity should nevertheless be forbidden, in the name of community. But is it an injustice to forbid the transactions that generate those inequalities? Do the relevant prohibitions merely define the terms within which justice will operate, or do they sometimes (justifiably?) contradict justice? I do not know the answer to that question."

"I continue to find appealing the sentiment of a left-wing song that I learned in my childhood, which begins as follows: "If we should consider each other, a neighbor, a friend, or a brother, it could be a wonderful, wonderful world, it could be a wonderful world.""

"The circumstances of the camping trip are multiply special: many features distinguish it from the circumstances of life in a modern society. One may therefore not infer, from the fact that camping trips of the sort that I have described are feasible and desirable, that society-wide socialism is equally feasible and equally desirable. There are too many major differences between the contexts for that inference to carry any conviction. What we urgently need to know is precisely what are the differences that matter, and how can socialists address them? Because of its contrasts with life in the large, the camping trip model serves well as a reference point for purported demonstrations that socialism across society is not feasible and/or desirable, since it seems eminently feasible and desirable on the trip."

"Whereas many socialists have recently put their faith in market socialism, nineteenth-century socialists were, by contrast, for the most part opposed to market organization of economic life. The mainstream socialist pioneers favored something that they thought would be far superior, to wit, comprehensive central planning, which, it was hoped, could realize the socialist ideal of a truly sharing society. And the pioneers' successors were encouraged by what they interpreted as victories of planning, such as the industrialization of the Soviet Union and the early institution of educational and medical provision in the People's Republic of China. But central planning, at least as practiced in the past, is, we now know, a poor recipe for economic success, at any rate once a society has provided itself with the essentials of a modern productive system."

"Market socialism does not fully satisfy socialist standards of distributive justice, but it scores far better by those standards than market capitalism does, and is therefore an eminently worthwhile project, from a socialist point of view."

"The technology for using base motives to productive economic effect is reasonably well understood. Indeed, the history of the twentieth century encourages the thought that the easiest way to generate productivity in a modern society is by nourishing the motives of which I spoke earlier, namely, those of greed and fear. But we should never forget that greed and fear are repugnant motives. Who would propose running a society on the basis of such motives, and thereby promoting the psychology to which they belong, if they were not known to be effective, if they did not have the instrumental value which is the only value that they have?"

"I never believed, as many Marxists professed to do, that normative principles were irrelevant to the socialist movement, that, since the movement was of oppressed people fighting for their own liberation, there was no room or need for specifically moral inspiration in it. I thought no such thing partly for the plain reason that I observed enormous selfless dedication among the active communists who surrounded me in my childhood, and partly for the more sophisticated reason that the self-interest of any oppressed producer would tell him to stay at home, rather than to risk his neck in a revolution whose success or failure would be anyhow unaffected by his participation in it. Revolutionary workers and, a fortiori, bourgeois fellow-travellers without a particular material interest in socialism, must perforce be morally inspired."

"It is true, it is true that we were beaten, but in the end, by what? By money and certain ethnic votes, essentially."

"Well, in a case like this, what do we do? We spit in our hands and we start over!"

"Can you imagine feds saying we don't like your answers."

"See? That's what happens when you keep people from doing what they do best: It makes them insane."

"Justice is a jagged road."

"It's not enough to do good. You have to be seen doing good."

"Bad guys do what good guys dream."

"Oh, the Patriot Act. I read that in its original title, 1984."

"The more I know, the less I sleep."

"Nobody's reasonable when they're in love. That's the whole point of it."

"Beauty, brains, and a complete psycho. My dream girl."

"Just how far up your ass is your head?!"

"The search for truth...It's not for the faint-hearted."

"I'm playing legal tiddlywinks with these punks. What I'd really like to do is take 'em up to Battery Park and hang 'em by the scrotum."

"If you're going to play stickball in Canarsie you better learn Brooklyn rules."

"I'll make sure you go away for so long, they'll be planting tomatoes on Mars by the time you get out."

"Women write crime better than men do. Men tend to play it safe, relying on an old-boy's network (to get work). Women feel freer. They swing for the bleachers."

"In L.A., the only thing within walking distance is your car."

"Man has only the rights he can defend. Our most basic right is life. It's enshrined not only in our Constitution, but in the charter of the United Nations. The prohibition against taking a life is found in our most ancient texts and in the statutes of every nation. Every murder, whether in Brooklyn, Santiago, Rwanda or Kosovo, demands punishment by whatever legal means possible. Otherwise, the right to life is just an empty promise. The law against murder applies to all. No matter the perpetrator, the victim, or the country where the murder is committed. It is the one moral law that recognizes no national, racial or religious boundaries. It can tolerate no exception. There is one law. One law. And when that law is broken it is the duty of every officer of any court to rise in defense of that law, and bring their full power and diligence to bear against the law breaker. Because Man has only those rights he can defend. Only those rights."

"Your client's not insane... he's in love. Maybe it's hard for you to tell the two apart, but the law can."

"It is true that one of the first acts of tyrants is to erase history, to wipe out the recorded memory of a people. With that in mind, it's important to remember that the work that we do as writers, artists and performers will form an essential part of the collective memory that future generations will draw upon. And so we owe it to those future generations to defend that memory and be honest witnesses to our times."

"I write about power, that's my real subject - how you get it, what you do with it, how you abuse it. I'm equally wary of liberals and conservatives."

"Torture injures everyone who comes into contact with it and corrodes the country that abides it."

"I’m sympathetic to the decent and hapless footsoldier into whose lap falls the unenviable duty of carrying out fubar policies."

"We by nature mistrust authority no matter who wields it—and I think that’s healthy. Though I disagreed with him on the facts, I fully support Rep. Joe Wilson’s right to call out President Obama—I just wish Democrats had had the balls to call out President Bush when he was peddling his lies to Congress."

"Indeed, Barack Obama has exceptional qualities and deserves kudos for his achievement. He is genteel, articulate, poised and charming. He is a Harvard-educated lawyer, yet he remains accessible to the common man. He has been married since 1992, has two lovely daughters and is by all accounts a devoted family man. He is a pious Christian and a member of the United Church of Christ."

"Conservatives need to be reinvigorated in their pursuit of core principles; the movement must become more than simply an ideological fig leaf for the Republican Party. It is time to focus on achieving real victory—a victory over the economic collectivism and cultural barbarism that is modern liberalism."

"The pope understands this eternal truth: Societies cannot endure for long without a belief in God and a submission to His will. We are ignoring him at our peril."

"It is a terrible mistake for conservatives to abandon our Iraqi allies now. A U.S. victory will establish a vibrant, modern democracy in the heart of the Arab world that will serve as an infectious model for the oppressed peoples in the region. A prosperous, democratic Iraq will become a catalyst for reform percolating within the ossified, conservative dictatorships of its neighbors. This change may be messy. In the long-run, however, Arab nations will be modernized. This will create a more stable and secure Middle East and thereby, a more stable and secure world for the United States."

"There was no one in the world quite like Plante. I learned more from him in two years with the Leafs than I did in all my other hockey days. He taught me a great deal about playing goal both on the ice and in my head off the ice. He taught me to be aggressive around the goal and take an active part in play instead of waiting for things to happen. He showed me how I kept putting myself off-balance by placing my weight on my left leg instead of on my stick side. He taught me how to steer shots off into the corner instead of letting them rebound in front of me. That old guy made a good goalie out of me."

"You don't have to be crazy to be a goalie, but it helps!"