Quotes from Francis Canavan

Not many years ago there were people in this country who would tell you that there are no absolute moral principles and that we should not presume to impose our principles on others, but of course the Vietnam War was absolutely immoral.

The word progressive, for example. It will never be known, said Charles Peguy, ''what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive. Yet the word is meaningless until we add meaning to it. It suggests movement in the right direction, but we have no idea what direction that is until we learn what goal we are progressing towards and why we should move toward it. Progressives seldom say; they just assume that everyone knows.

All men want peace but, as St. Augustine remarked, they want it on their own terms; hence the prevalence of wars. It is doubtful if anyone ever brought about peace simply by being for it or prevented war by being against war as such. On the contrary, turning peace into a political slogan may help to bring on a war.

Any suggestion that what is offered in that marketplace should at least be an idea rather than a raw appeal to passion is met with cries of Censorship! Those who cry the most loudly, however, are not always concerned to preserve freedom of discussion. More often, discussion is what they want to prevent, and they have discovered that reciting the ritual word censorship is an effective way to do it.

At a political science convention which I attended some years ago, one of the speakers mentioned toward the end of his talk that the education code of every state in the Union gives the public schools a mandate to form moral character. In the discussion period that followed a young woman with a marked Southern accent protested: Ah am shocked by what Ah just heard—it goes against everything Ah learned in graduate school!

Either that, or we must resort to endless circumlocution like the Faculty Statutes of my own university, which avoid personal pronouns by repeating the noun, the individual, every time a pronoun would be called for. Needless to say, the statutes read like a document drawn up by a committee of pixilated schoolteachers.