“D is a very weak-minded fellow I am afraid and, like the feather pillow, bears the marks of the last person who has sat on him.”
“Lord Haig” re “Lord Derby” in 1918, quoted by Mark Steyn in the Daily Telegraph August 1, 2004
“If it came as a surprise to Khrushchev, why wouldn’t it come as a surprise to me?”
Soviet scholar Adam Ulam when asked why he didn’t predict Khrushchev's downfall in 1964, quoted in Globe & Mail April 1, 2000
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the chattering classes have no business mocking a truckers’ convoy for not understanding how government works when they’ve forgotten too.
“just as historians tell us that Richard I was not fit to fill the shoes of bold Henry II – and that Richard Cromwell was not fit to wear the mantle of his uncle – they might add in future years that Richard Nixon did not measure to the footsteps of Dwight D. Eisenhower.”
John F. Kennedy’s nomination acceptance speech July 16, 1960 (the irony being that the metaphor only works if we have some idea who these people were, yet JFK didn’t realize Richard “Tumble-Down Dick” Cromwell was not Oliver’s nephew but his son, or that Oliver Cromwell’s “mantle” is not something you would want to have fit you).
In my latest National Post column, while acknowledging the world-historic greatness of Justin Trudeau now that he has emergency powers, I ask whether our governments’ manifest incapacity to do even simple things including fixing health care derives from having long ago substituted make-believe for serious thought.
In my latest Mercatornet column I warn that the divisions over the protest convoy reflect a collapse of trust in Canadian society that will not be healed by both sides acting untrustworthy.
“I wish I were as cocksure about anything as Tom Macaulay is about everything.”
“Melbourne’s celebrated comment on Macaulay” according to a letter from John O. Voll in National Review December 2, 1991
“The only proposals in the senate that I have seen fit to mention are particularly praiseworthy or particularly scandalous ones. It seems to me a historian’s foremost duty to ensure that merit is recorded, and to confront evil words and deeds with the fear of posterity’s denunciation.”
Publius Cornelius Tacitus The Annals of Imperial Rome