“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
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.
Modern evils “arise from the governing classes having too much liberty and the governed having less liberty than ever.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted in “Chesterton’s Mail Bag” (subhed “Church and State (not in that order)”) in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
“The president [Ronald Reagan], apparently, was so totally unaware of where his foreign policy was that he had to appoint a distinguished commission to help him locate it, and when they commissioners called him in to testify, he told them, essentially, that he couldn’t remember what it looked like. Now, if Richard Nixon had claimed something like that you would at least have had the comfort of knowing he was lying. You could trust Nixon that way. But with this president, you have this nagging feeling that he’s telling the truth.”
Dave Barry Greatest Hits [re Iran-Contra mostly].
“‘There is nothing particular about man. He is but a part of this world.’ Today, in the West, there are many who would agree with [the just-quoted Heinrich] Himmler that, for humanity to claim a special status for itself, to imagine itself as somehow superior to the rest of creation, is an unwarrantable conceit. Homo sapiens is just another species.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
In my latest Loonie Politics column I draw a connection between the mental paralysis of cultural relativism and the inability of Western nations to defend themselves militarily.
“Most people do not accumulate a body of experience. Most people go through life undergoing a series of happenings, which pass through their systems undigested. Happenings become experiences when they are digested, when they are reflected on, related to general patterns, and synthesized.”
Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals
“You can make your book with roguery, but vanity is incalculable.”
Cecil Rhodes to John Buchan, who met Rhodes and worked for him toward the end of Rhodes’ life, quoted in Roger Kimball, “‘Realism coloured by poetry’; Rereading John Buchan,” in The New Criterion September 2003 online