“history: a hill or high point of vantage from which men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 18, 1932, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #7 (June 2003)
“History is not a social science but an unavoidable form of thought. That ‘we live forward but we can only think backward’ is true not only of the present (which is always a fleeting illusion) but of our entire view of the future: for even when we think of the future we do this by remembering it. But history cannot tell us anything about the future with certainty.”
John Lukacs, At the End of an Age
In my latest National Post column I offer the State of the Union address I think should be given in 2019… even if it makes people cry.
“The problem of an enduring ethic and culture consists in finding an arrangement of the pieces by which they remain related, as do the stones arranged in an arch. And I know only one scheme that has thus proved its solidity, bestriding lands and ages with its gigantic arches, and carrying everywhere the high river of baptism upon an aqueduct of Rome.”
G.K. Chesterton, “Is Humanism a Religion?” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 #8 (Issue 57, July-August 2004)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say if Theresa May’s record 432-202 thumping over Brexit, the most important political issue not just of her Prime Ministership but of this generation in Britain, is not a loss of confidence forcing her resignation, then the British Constitution as we have known it for at least 250 years no longer exists.
“To judge rightly of the present we must oppose it to the past; for all judgement is comparative, and of the future nothing can be known.’“
Imlac in Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas
“Liberty, next to religion, has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime, from the sowing of the seed at Athens, 2,460 years ago, until the ripened harvest was gathered by men of our race.”
Start of Lord Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton) The History of Freedom