“Few believe that France and Germany could go to war again or that Communism could again aspire to be a world system.”
British journalist John Lloyd writing in Globe & Mail March 15, 2000 (a piece Xi Jinping apparently missed)
“Nay, what is man’s whole terrestrial Life but a Symbolic Representation, and making visible, of the Celestial invisible Force that is in him? By act and word he strives to do it; with sincerity, if possible; failing that, with theatricality, which latter also may have its meaning.”
Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution
“The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that the key insight into any society in any age is had by inquiring into what people didn’t write about; because that is what those people, in that age, simply took for granted.”
William F. Buckley Jr. in National Review January 24, 2000
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say there’s a stark divide in Canada and throughout the West, vividly on display over the truckers’ convoy, between those who favour plain reasoning and those who like their logic ornate, dazzling and convoluted.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Socrates, quoted in Neil Postman Building a Bridge to the 18th Century (and about 10 million other places)
“he immatures with age”.
Harold Wilson (of Tony Benn) quoted in The Economist July 11, 1992
“‘I cannot predict the future,’ as one of my favourite historians says, ‘but I can tell you what isn’t going to happen.’”
David Warren in Ottawa Citizen June 10, 1999
“Of all political ideals, that of making people happy is perhaps the most dangerous one. It leads invariably to the attempt to impose our scale of ‘higher’ values upon others, in order to make them realize what seems to us of greatest importance for their happiness; in order, as it were, to save their souls.”
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 2