“Her [Rome’s] language became, by a most admirable corruption, the speech of Italy, Rumania, France, Spain, Portugal, and Latin America; half the white man’s world speaks a Latin tongue. Latin was, till the 18th century, the Esperanto of science, scholarship, and philosophy in the West; it gave a convenient international terminology to botany and zoology; it survives in the sonorous ritual and official documents of the Roman Church; it still writes medical prescriptions, and haunts the phraseology of the law. It entered by direct appropriation, and again through the romance languages (regalis, regal, royal; paganus, pagan, peasant), to enhance the wealth and flexibility of English speech. Our Roman heritage works in our lives a thousand times a day.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

In my latest Epoch Times column I ask what we, the voters, would like them, the politicians, to do when they think we’re wrong on an issue, pander or debate, because we probably will get what we wish for.

“The period during which light was ‘sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle’ was a period of crisis – a period when something was wrong – and it ended only with the development of wave mechanics and the realization that light was a self-consistent entity different from both waves and particles. In the sciences, therefore, if perceptual switches accompany paradigm changes, we may not expect scientists to attest to these changes directly. Looking at the moon, the convert to Copernicanism does not say, ‘I used to see a planet, but now I see a satellite.’ That locution would imply a sense in which the Ptolemaic system had once been correct. Instead, a convert to the new astronomy says, ‘I once took the moon to be (or saw the moon as) a planet, but I was mistaken.’ That sort of statement does recur in the aftermath of scientific revolutions.”

Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition

“Rome has had no rival in the art of government. The Roman state committed a thousand political crimes; it built its edifice upon a selfish oligarchy and an obscurantist priesthood; it achieved a democracy of freemen, and then destroyed it with corruption and violence; it exploited its conquests to support a parasitic Italy, which, when it could no longer exploit, collapsed. Here in there, in East and West, it created a desert and called it peace. But amid all this evil it formed a majestic system of law which through nearly all Europe gave security to life and property, incentive and continuity to industry, from the Decemvirs to Napoleon. It molded a government of separated legislative and executive powers whose checks and balances inspired the makers of constitutions as late as revolutionary America and France. For a time it united monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy so successfully as to win the applause of philosophers, historians, subjects, and enemies. It gave municipal institutions, and for a long period municipal freedom, to half a thousand cities. It administered its empire at first with greed and cruelty and then with such tolerance and essential justice that the great realm has never again known a like content. It made the desert blossom with civilization, and atoned for its sins with the miracle of a lasting peace. Today our highest labours seek to revive the Pax Romana for a disordered world.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

In my latest Epoch Times column I say we won’t put out the fire in the public accounts until we agree on how much borrowing is sustainable and how much is not without first checking to see if it was their team or ours that did it.

“Like most thinkers of his time, [Marcus] Aurelius conceived philosophy not as a speculative description of infinity, but as a school of virtue and a way of life. He hardly bothers to make up his mind about God; sometimes he talks like an agnostic, acknowledging that he does not know; but having made that admission, he accepts the traditional faith with a simple piety. ‘Of what worth is it to me,’ he asks, ‘to live in a universe without gods or Providence?’”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

After noting that French Canadians put up passively with the Stamp Act “Carlton had to deal with the problem of the law: the French liked the swiftness and low cost of court access under the French system, but it was a different law, governed by French precedent, which was irritating in itself and practically incomprehensible to the administration in Quebec and difficult to obtain. The substitution of English criminal law had been popular with the public, as it instituted habeas corpus and put an end to the rack and interrogation under torture. London sent legal officers to go back to make a recommendation, and this issue dragged on for a few years, but Carlton became convinced that Quebec needed to devise its own Civil Code, to keep what was familiar, incite pride, and emancipate the province from recourse to French precedents.”

Conrad Black Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present

“In 1870, the Prussian army had captured the French emperor, Napoleon III, who followed Charles X, Metternich, and Louis-Philippe into exile in London.”

Conrad Black Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present [but he does not take what I consider to be the obvious point that all these continentals who sneer at the English-speaking world flee to it when in trouble, knowing it is the true and only home of liberty]