“I have a worldview, of a sort, and a wider concern. But politics begins at home. The immediate business, and the one that one might hope to understand, is not to reform the world or save mankind, but to make decisions relative to Australia’s immediate needs.”
“Politics” in “A Plot Unmasked” in Leonie Kramer, ed., James McAuley: Poetry, essays and personal commentary
“the deep but neglected truth that melancholy is inescapably self-important, whereas there is a relative impersonality about cheerfulness.”
Stefan Collini Arnold
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the dismissal then minimization of allegations against former CDS Jonathan Vance are all too typical of a political class that does not understand accountability… or security.
“You have a disagreeable way of being right.” “It’s the curse of a distrustful nature.”
An exchange between two characters on the TV show Law and Order September 4, 1997. I am not certain the “disagreeable way” is verbatim and I did not record which characters. If you disapprove of this sloppiness, complain to my editor.
“’People say to me, that it is but a dream to suppose that Christianity should regain the organic power in human society which once it possessed. I cannot help that; I never said it could. I am not a politician; I am proposing no measures, but exposing a fallacy, and resisting a pretence. Let Benthamism reign, if men have no aspirations; but do not tell them to be romantic, and then solace them with glory; do not attempt by philosophy what was once done by religion. The ascendancy of Faith may be impracticable, but the reign of Knowledge is incomprehensible.’”
John Henry Newman, “The Tamworth Reading Room” (1841) quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind
“You’re so thin you’d have to stand twice in the same place to make a shadow!”
“Shorty” in Louis L’Amour The Trail to Seven Pines
On Alex Epstein’s “Power Hour” podcast we had an extended discussion of China’s geopolitical ambitions and how the Western obsession with “Net Zero” plays into the hands of a Politburo all too happy to keep using fossil fuels while we cripple ourselves by discarding them.
In my latest National Post column I pick up on the Post’s fall series “A Serious Canada” to lament just how unserious a look at a typical newspaper front page reveals us to be on everything from Chinese Communist aggression to budgeting to open government.