“No man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.”
“Th. B. Macaulay, History of England” quoted in Burton Malkiel A Random Walk Down Wall Street
“Penny candy rotted your teeth just as fast when it didn’t cost a quarter.”
Bob Uecker and Mickey Herskowitz. Catcher in the Wry.
“I invite the reader’s attention to the much more serious consideration [than myths in very early history] of the kind of lives our ancestors lived, of who were the men, and what the means both in politics and war by which Rome’s power was first acquired and subsequently expanded; I would then have him trace the process of our moral decline, to watch, first, the sinking of the foundations of morality as the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the rapidly increasing disintegration, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them.”
Titus Livius (“Livy”) The Early History of Rome
In my latest Epoch Times column I wax nostalgic about the days when people pretended they’d read books I didn’t want to, instead of admitting they don’t read.
“You don’t have to be cruel to be tough.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email February 4, 2022
“The Convoy Conference prior to our sailing was held ashore at Cardiff and was so particularly dull and uninformative that the Flag Officer Cardiff fell sound asleep. The Conference certainly had the merit that it could not possibly have alarmed the Masters of the merchant ships who were being briefed for the venture.”
Bob Whinney, The U-Boat Peril: A Fight for Survival (regarding a convoy that sailed on June 5 to help supply the U.S. beaches on D-Day).
In my latest Loonie Politics column I ask why the legacy media are so reticent about covering suicide but so keen to report all the lurid details on (American) mass shootings
“The Master said, ‘Men of antiquity studied to improve themselves; men today study to impress others.’”
Confucius Analects XIV.24