“What is being asked of me is clear. Whether I have the talent and understanding sufficient to accomplish the task is God’s affair.”

A remark attributed to "the young Otto von Bismarck... upon receiving a very delicate diplomatic mission in his early twenties" according to a writer whose name I did not record in Commentary March 1990

Futurologists (whether utopian or dystopian, and in this instance flapping about the Internet) make “precisely the same mistake that many historians make when writing about the remoter past. And this mistake, it seems to me, is to suppose that to change the material circumstances of life is to alter fundamentally the sense of life itself. But life as it is lived is always pretty much the same, with the same protocols of boredom and excitement, the same glare of midday and gloom of eventide, the same petty ambitions, existential doubts, and immortal longings. We can certainly create the circumstances of greater freedom or greater oppression, but the range of possible variation in life itself, in the simple, irreducible sense of being alive, is far narrower than our chattering classes usually appreciate.”

James Gardner in National Review October 14, 1996

In my latest Epoch Times column I say there’s a lot more sense in certain calls to “Defund the police” than you might think or than some advocates exhibit.

In my latest Mercatornet column I say people should be sad and compassionate not vindictive over racism and riots in the United States and elsewhere.

“We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities.”

John Winthrop, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things November 2002

“For it is only the love of honour that never grows old; and honour it is, not gain, as some would have it, that rejoices the heart of age and helplessness.”

Thucydides quoting Pericles’ “Funeral Oration” from The Peloponnesian War (an online version; other translations exist, obviously)