In my latest National Post column I say the worst thing about the Liberals’ doctored video showing Erin O’Toole supporting more private options in health care is that there’s no way it could possibly be true.
“When I find myself depressed over present conditions, I can, within one hour, banish worry and turn myself into a shouting optimist. Here is how I do it. I enter my library, close my eyes, and walk to certain shelves containing only books on history. With my eyes still shut, I reach for a book, not knowing whether I am picking up Prescott's Conquest of Mexico or Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Caesars. With my eyes still closed, I opened the book at random. I then open my eyes and read for an hour; and the more I read, the more sharply I realize that the world has always been in the throes of agony, that civilization has always been tottering on the brink. The pages of history fairly shriek with tragic tales of war, famine, poverty, pestilence, and man's inhumanity to man. After reading history for an hour, I realize that bad as conditions are now, they are infinitely better than they used to be. This enables me to see and face my present troubles in their proper perspective as well as to realize that the world as a whole is constantly growing better.”
“’I Can Turn Myself Into A Shouting Optimist Within An Hour’ by Roger W. Babson Famous Economist, Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts” in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
In my latest Loonie Politics column I lament that far too many voters still believe politicians can shower them with free money and not germinating a nasty crop of debt and inflation instead of wealth and social services.
“The moral state of mankind fills me with dismays and horrors.”
Edmund Burke, expressly re his own time, quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind
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