“Totalitarianism is feudalism in the twelfth century sense of the word.”

There is sometimes a peculiar confusion in the West that equates progress to whatever is recent or whatever is new, and it is time we understood that progress has nothing to do with the chronology of an idea.

When faced with the inevitable fatigue that comes with the recycling of speeches and the recycling of thoughts in a rather small stream of vortex, I am urged to not be ashamed of recycling.

If America was trying to keep the bubonic plague out of its hemisphere, Canadians would import it just to show their independence of American foreign policy.

Of course the barbarians’ aim of world domination has not escaped the attention of the Europeans, perhaps because unlike us they are closer to the walls.

When virtue is at liberty, so to some extent is vice. In a free world there is, alas, more common crime than in a dictatorial system.

By now it is evident that the Soviet Union must gain control of Europe to maintain its empire.

Indeed, we Jews were at the leading edge of communist totalitarianism, one of the most murderous movements of the 20th century.

The People’s Republic of China has not yet reached the military might of the Soviet Empire. It requires a little more time and a little more infusion of Western aid, loans, technology and the hard currency of our tourists.

Since Europe is dependent on imports of energy and most of its raw materials, it can be subdued, if not quite conquered, without all those nuclear weapons the Soviets have aimed at it simply through the shipping routes and raw materials they control.

The interests of the Soviet Union are in controlling highly developed countries and having the benefit of their economies so that they can run their own inefficient empire.

There are, of course, all sorts of other unpleasant regimes outside the walls as well – the military dictators of Latin America and the apartheid regime of South Africa.

The world today is divided into the free and the enslaved.

It is not empty rhetoric to talk of the Free World.

Our society is not perfect and this will come as no surprise to many of you. But liberty, you see, that precious child of our liberal democracy only two hundred years old, has one notable side effect.

The same liberty that protects me also protects members of the Mafia.

I have got up at truly deplorable hours in the morning to confront Vancouver’s Jack Webster on television because I have been told that is the place to get exposure for ideas.

Since the middle of the 20th century, more has been learnt about the ocean than during all preceding human history; at the same time, more has been lost.

The two major challenges for the 21st century are to improve the economic situation of the majority and save as much of the planet as we can.

By the end of the 20th century, up to 90 percent of the sharks, tuna, swordfish, marlins, groupers, turtles, whales, and many other large creatures that prospered in the Gulf for millions of years had been depleted by overfishing.

Large areas of the Gulf have escaped being scraped by trawls, crushed by more than 40,000 miles of pipelines, or displaced by one of 50,000 oil and gas wells drilled since the middle of the 20th century. Some places have been deliberately protected.

There have been times when I played more than others, but I’ve been a road comic for a quarter of a century, so I’ve always played golf on the road because you have a lot of time to kill.

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

Bohr’s influence on the physics and the physicists of our century was stronger than that of anyone else, even than that of Albert Einstein.

The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas – fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.