“‘If he is dead to-day,’ he [Phocion to a tumultuous Athenian crowd following a rumour that Alexander the Great had died] said, ‘he will be so to-morrow and the day after to-morrow equally. So that there is no need to take counsel hastily or before it is safe.’”
Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, Plutarch’s Lives II
“It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word. The Crusade without the Cross is a dead word.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Jan. 12, 1924, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol 10 #5 (March 2007)
“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Riddle of the Ivy” in Tremendous Trifles, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 No. 4 (Jan/Feb. 2000)
“The view that human beings are by nature good and reasonable creatures who can compose their differences peacefully is incompatible with what we know of human behavior in recorded history. It is starkly utopian.... Order can exist without justice and freedom, as we well know, but justice and freedom cannot exist without order.”
Sidney Hook in American Spectator July 1988
In the Epoch Times I argue that Justin Trudeau’s Canada Agenda 2030 isn’t part of some vast shadowy Great Reset plot, just a set of trendy progressive notions whose sweeping cosmic ambitions will succumb to their own vagueness and his chronic managerial incompetence.
In my latest National Post column, I use Fred Litwin’s new book On the Trail of Delusion about Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories to warn of the danger even of the amazingly common garden variety notion that people who disagree with us about public policy must be hiding their real goals.
“Education, even democratic education, will not remove international conflict, because conflict is rooted in the morally ambiguous nature of man.”
Ernest W. Lefever, Ethics And United States Foreign Policy
“There are two levers for moving men; interest and fear."
Widely attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte online but I have not found a specific attribution (mind you, I once worked for someone who said “There are two ways of motivating people – one is fear and I’ve forgotten the other” and the funny thing is, he was a great boss. But I was afraid of incurring his justified displeasure.)