“Writing shortly after the Roman disaster at Adrianople in 378 AD, the able historian Ammianus recited a similar list of disasters, and summed up by saying that Rome had come back from all of them and, given political will and good fortune, would do so again. Thirty years later, the Visigoths were in Rome.”
Eric Morse in Globe & Mail August 17 2004
In my latest National Post column I lampoon self-centred objections to the Pope calling preferring pets to children selfish.
“he looked upon us as a sort of animals, to whose share, by what accident he could not conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use, than by its assistance, to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones, which nature had not given us; that we …had been very successful in multiplying our original wants, and seemed to spend our whole lives in vain endeavours to supply them by our own inventions…”
The narrator’s account of his Houyhnhnm master’s judgement on humans, in Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels
In my latest Epoch Times column, I say the plan to help Ukraine fight off Russian aggression by striking a committee to ponder helping fund an ammunition factory someday is a classically feeble Canadian government response to a real-world problem.
“For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live forever. The very Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against them, in Heaven’s Chancery itself…”
Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution
“When bad things happen, they are never the bad things that were inevitable. You may be quite certain that, if an old pessimist says the country is going to the dogs, it will go to any other animals except the dogs.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 17, 1926, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 #6 (April/May 2004)
“From his $1,200 haircuts to his personal war on poverty, proclaimed from the porch of his 28,000-square-foot home, purchased with the proceeds of preposterous lawsuits exploiting infant cerebral palsy, [US Democratic Senator, presidential contender and John Kerry’s 2004 running mate, John] Edwards is living proof that history can play out as tragedy and farce simultaneously.”
Theo Caldwell in National Post December 27, 2007
In my latest National Post column I say the cycle of COVID lockdowns is like a bad remake of Groundhog Day, where no lessons get learned