The Soviet Union was brought down by a strange global coalition of Western European conservatives, Eastern European nationalists, Russian liberals, Chinese communists, and Afghan Islamic reactionaries, to name only a few. Many of these discordant groups disliked the United States intensely. But Americans were able to mobilize them to direct their ire at the Soviet Union first.

So little of what makes a democracy work is written down. So much of it is just the things you don't do. There are a lot of things that a prime minister or a president can do and they don't do them because it never occurs to them to do them.

Maybe it's true that people with less extreme views who are also interested in public affairs have been driven out by a marketplace that doesn't offer them anything of the tone they want to listen to.

That is the way successful countries, and Canada has been one of the most successful countries over the past quarter century, they operate. That when you win, you win within limits, when you lose, you accept the outcome.

Life, as the signs in the liquor stores say, is too short to drink bad wine. And summer is too short to read bad books.

So if I have two pieces of cake, do I have twice as good an experience as the first piece of cake? One of the things I've found in life is that the first piece of cake is the best.

If you watch a movie from between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1970s, whenever anyone steps out in a white lab coat, they're there to offer a solution. They're there to tell you how the laser's going to save the day. They're going to give you James Bond's array of tools. After about 1975, whenever the man in the white lab coat steps out, it's to come up with some crazy idea that's going to bring ruin on everybody. "Let's clone dinosaurs!" And the last we see of him is disappearing down the gullet of the Tyrannosaurus rex.