In my latest National Post column I summon the shade of former U.S. President and master of Realpolitik Richard M. Nixon to discuss the ominous parallel implications of the collapse of the Afghan and Vietnamese missions for Western credibility in the world.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say our constitution has deteriorated so far into populism that elections are no longer about issues, only who gets unchecked power until the next vote.
“Is there a possibility that the government of nations may fall into the hands of men who teach the most disconsolate of all creeds, that men are but fireflies, and that this all is without a father?”
John Quincy Adams, in the Letters of Publicola, quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind [Kirk added that the specific target was Thomas Paine and that Adams went on that rather than such an outcome “Give us again the gods of the Greeks.”]
Regarding the new French Minister “whom you have commended as a ‘sensible and honest man;’ these are qualities too rare and too precious not to merit one’s particular esteem.”
George Washington to the Marquis de Lafayette Feb. 7 1788, in W.B. Allen, ed. George Washington: A Collection
“I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.”
Edmund Burke, about Marie Antoinette, quoted by Christopher Hitchens reviewing Frank M. Turner’s edition of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France in The Atlantic Monthly April 2004 (how’s that for a convoluted source?)
“To horse, to horse! urge doubts to them that fear.”
Lord Ross, among those making up their minds to abandon Richard II for Bolingbroke, in William Shakespeare The Life and Death of King Richard II Act II Scene ii.
“A hasty general is the worst of generals nowadays; the best is a sort of von Moltke, who is passive if any man ever was passive; who is ‘silent in seven languages’…”
Walter Bagehot Physics and Politics
“Most men are bad.”
“A saying often attributed to” Bias of Priene according to Peter D’Epiro and Mary Desmond Pinkowish What are the Seven Wonders of the World? (“along with the advice to live as if our live span will be both long and short.”)