In my latest National Post column I praise Prince Philip for his character, modesty and acid wit, three things the modern world needs badly.
In my latest National Post column I say if the Senate can write silly patronizing children's books for adults, I can too. Please send me money.
"Suddenly it becomes evident that things which for thousands of years the human imagination had banished to a realm beyond human competence can be manufacture right here on earth, that Hell and Purgatory, and even a shadow of their perpetual duration, can be established by the most modern methods of destruction and therapy. To these people (and they are more numerous in any large city than we like to admit) the totalitarian hell proves only that the power of man is greater than they ever dared to think, and that man can realize hellish fantasies without making the sky fall or the earth open…. Nothing perhaps distinguishes modern masses as radically from those of previous centuries as the loss of faith in a Last Judgement: the worst have lost their fear and the best have lost their hope." Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, with specific reference to film footage from Nazi concentration camps
"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." Marcus Aurelius
"We live in a wondrous time in which the strong is weak because of his moral scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity." Otto von Bismarck, quoted by Arnold Beichman in National Review January 28, 2002
In my latest National Post column, which made the front page, I say the little yellow ducks waved at anti-corruption protests in Russia, Brazil and elsewhere are dangerous to brittle tyrannies.
"he [André Malraux] was fond of quoting Napoleon’s proclamation, 'My life is quite a novel.'" Algis Valiunas reviewing Olivier Todd’s Malraux: A Life in National Review July 4, 2005 - and I suppose a "pithy" quotation fails if it requires an extensive gloss, but I have to add my reaction on reading this line, namely that if you ever notice such a thing about your own life you need to consider urgently the question "Yes but by which author?"