In my contribution to the National Post’s 20th anniversary section, I celebrate the freedom the paper has given its writers to express conservative opinions and respect the intelligence of our readers.
“It is a pleasant and consoling thought to think that our posterity will find sufficient entertainment in the contemplation of the enormous blunders that you are making at this moment. That will be a continuous source of laughter and joy to them.”
G.K. Chesterton in “Culture and the Coming Peril” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #5 (March-April 2005)
“Refiners may weave as fine a web of reason as they please, but the experience of all times shows Religion to be the guardian of morals.”
Richard Henry Lee in a letter to James Madison, quoted in Forrest McDonald Novus Ordo Seclorum
“Such reactions [seeing only the enormous good or bad potential of a new technology] are amplified by what might be termed chronocentricity – the egotism that one’s own generation is posed on the very cusp of history. Today, we are repeatedly told that we are in the midst of a communications revolution. But the electric telegraph was, in many ways, far more disconcerting...”
Epilogue in Tom Standage The Victorian Internet
“It is natural to civilised man to go back upon his past, and to be grateful for all profit he can gain from the study of his own development. So we may be certain that the claim of Greece and Rome to our eternal gratitude will never cease to be asserted, and their right to teach us still what we could have learnt nowhere else will never be successfully disputed.”
W. Warde Fowler, Rome (written November 1911)