“One sword keeps another in the sheath.”
George Herbert on Brainy Quote (www.brainyquote.com/quotes/george_herbert_152910)
“‘Optimism is cowardice.’”
Oswald Spengler, quoted by Modris Eksteins in Globe & Mail June 3, 2000
Machiavelli’s advice about walking in the footsteps of the great “makes two points: first, that we’re bound to learn from the past whether or not we make the effort, since it’s the only data base we have and second, that we might as well try to do so systematically. E.H. Carr... observed, in What Is History?, that the size and reasoning capacity of the human brain are probably no greater now than they were five thousand years ago, but that very few human beings live now as they did then.... ‘History is progress through the transmission of acquired skills from one generation to another.’”
John Lewis Gaddis The Landscape of History
In the National Post I condemn Mark Zuckerberg’s clueless call for global censorship in response to ugly behaviour online.
In BOE Report I ask how a person not dogmatically committed to the concept of man-made global warming would go about deciding whether its happening.
“Trends that have held up over several hundred years are not apt to reverse themselves within the next several weeks.”
John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History