“history teaches, as no other subject can, the sad fact that acts have consequences.”
Robin Neillands, The Wars of the Roses
“We live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark. Who are we? Where do we come from? Whither are we bound?”
Hendrick Van Loon The Story of Mankind (the beginning)
“Unmaking the bomb (as I’ve written before) is like trying to un-eat the forbidden fruit. Leaving the Tree of Knowledge alone might have been a better choice, but it’s a bit too late for that. Pretending it never happened isn’t a useful idea. God had good reasons for his dietary restrictions in the Garden of Eden, arbitrary as they may have seemed to his critics, then and since.”
George Jonas in National Post August 8, 2015 (defending the use of nuclear weapons to end World War II; interestingly, Jonas was not a believer)
“The future is hidden even from the men who make it.”
Anatole France, quoted on https://www.hound-dog-media.com/2014/01/gamblers-fools-and-egotists-59-still_31.html
"The great inlet by which a color for oppression has entered the world is by one man’s pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another, and by claiming to use what means he thinks proper in order to bring him to a sense of it. It is the ordinary and trite sophism of oppression."
Edmund Burke, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things February 2003 (crediting it to a letter from Nino Langiulli of Lynbrook, New York and calling it "an observation of the ever–quotable Edmund Burke with which I was not familiar").
“Frederick Myers describes a conversation with her [George Eliot] in which, ‘taking as her text the words God, Immortality, Duty, she pronounced, with a terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how incredible the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third’…. It is quite normal now for people to go through life without an ultimate object, but to the Victorians it was new and daunting. No wonder so many of them were such odd fish – Kitchener, Rosebery, Salisbury, Dilke, Curzon, Carson, Randolph Churchill, Fisher, Rhodes, Milner. In many cases certitude was replaced by a streak of violence…”
Paul Johnson The Offshore Islanders
“Each man may have a glass to see things past whereby he may judge justly of things present, and wisely of things to come.”
Grafton’s Chronicle (1569), quoted in Robin Neillands, The Wars of the Roses
In my latest Loonie Politics column I welcome the crowded field of contenders for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, because somewhere in the field they might be able to find a candidate whose policies are not berserk and who actually seems to like America.