“Many of the lower middle class are members of labor unions, churches, bowling clubs, fraternal, service, and nationality organisations. They are organizations and people that must be worked with as one would work with any other part of our population – with respect, understanding, and sympathy. To reject them is to lose them by default. They will not shrivel and disappear. You can’t switch channels and get rid of them. This is what you have been doing in your radicalized dream world but they’re here and will be. If we don’t win them Wallace or Spiro T. Nixon will.”

Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [and it does help explain MAGA]

“It is in such times that we are haunted by the old maxim, ‘Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make ludicrous.’”

Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals

“We will either find a way or make one.”

“HANNIBAL” as header quotation on unnumbered chapter 7 “Tactics” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals

“If what you’re doing was easy, everybody would be doing it.”

J.C. Watts’ father, quoted in Ottawa Citizen “Citizen’s Weekly” December 20, 1998

His childhood faith gradually faded as he grew up. “Why, if God existed, had he allowed so many species to evolve, to flourish, and then utterly to disappear? Why, if he were merciful and good, had he permitted an asteroid to smash into the side of the planet, making the flesh on the bones of dinosaurs burst into flame, the Mesozoic seas to boil, and darkness to cover the face of the earth? I did not spend my whole time worrying about these questions; but sometimes, in the dead of night, I would. The hope offered by the Christian story, that there was an order and purpose to humanity’s existence, felt like something that had forever slipped my grasp. ‘The more the universe seems comprehensible,’ as the physicist Stephen Weinberg famously put it, ‘the more it also seems pointless.’”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the Republican model of Government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”

George Washington’s 1789 Inaugural Address [https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/inaugtxt.html].

“If any one of my works were a work of art, it would be very inartistic to defend it from critics. A work of art ought to be finished in every sense, good and bad; it should be either done well or done for, or both. This is true of art but not of argument; for I am happy to say that argument is never finished.”

G.K. Chesterton in New Witness 7/5/1920, quoted in unbylined “Art and Thought” compilation in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025) [my summary “Do it right or do it in” being, for once, worthy of GKC himself.

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say it would help us clean up political discourse as well as understand the Middle East if friends and foes alike could set aside head-banging and acknowledge what Trump has characteristically gotten very right, and characteristically gotten badly wrong, on Iran.