“The same sense of the relentlessly interwoven texture of human fate was touched by the schoolboy who said: ‘Dad, I hate war.’ ‘Why, son?’ ‘Because war makes history, and I hate history.’”
Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media
“I am unbelievably lucky: a. to be an American; b. To have my wife, the world’s finest human; c. To have never been severely or at least life-threateningly ill; d. To have never been in combat; e. To have had loving, caring, prosperous parents; f. To have an interesting, well-paid career; g. To have great friends, a great sister, nephew, niece, cousins, and, above all, son; h. Above all, to have learned to love and worship a God of love and understanding.”
“Benjamin J. Stein’s Diary” on his 60th birthday in The American Spectator February 2005
“One thing, however, I am very sure of: and that is, that if all mankind agreed to meet, and everyone brought his own sufferings along with him for the purpose of exchanging them for somebody else’s, there is not a man who, after taking a good look at his neighbour’s sufferings, would not be only too happy to return home with his own.”
Herodotus The Histories
“It was Macaulay who remarked that it was not pleasant to live in times about which it was exciting to read.”
Marshall McLuhan Understanding Media
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”
“Says a passage in the Talmud” according to Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties
“Men have no right to complain that they are naturally feeble and short-lived, or that it is chance and not merit that decides their destiny. On the contrary, reflection will show that nothing exceeds or surpasses the powers with which nature has endowed mankind, and that it is rather energy they lack than strength or length of days.”
Sallust, The Jugurthine War
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say if heads don’t roll over the latest revelations from the Mass Casualty Commission then we have pretty much given up on truth and decency.
“We live in strange times. Humans are loose upon the earth.”
Not sure why this of all weeks I quoted myself so often (this one from May 12, 2005) but since I don’t check the attributions while choosing them, only when posting them, we’re both stuck with it.