“As the historian Forrest McDonald pointed out, Filmer never persuaded anyone by eloquence or logic, since he possessed neither.”
Richard Brookheiser in National Review February 22, 1999 [Filmer being the 17th-century English Tory essayist Robert Filmer, the target of John Locke’s now mostly unread First Treatise of Government, which is now mostly unread in significant measure because it demolished Filmer so completely that nobody now remembers him]
In my latest Loonie Politics column I praise Mikhail Gorbachev for the fundamental decency that led him to permit the peaceful dissolution of Soviet Communism. But I insist that he was no statesman, and no thinker, and that credit for ending the Cold War properly belongs with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and their supporters.
“As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”
James Madison, quoted by Christopher Buckley in National Review November 22, 1999
“He [Arnold Toynbee] observes that one of the consistent symptoms of disintegration is that the elites – Toynbee’s ‘dominant minority’ – begin to imitate those at the bottom of society.”
Charles Murray in Wall Street Journal February 6 2001
Re a lot of the kids in Haight-Ashbury already by summer 1967 “They’re like zombies, people with deadened nervous systems, people who see themselves as skeletons festooned with flesh.... The result is a young person who has barbed-wire guts, to use a phrase suggested by [Erik] Erikson.”
Nicholas von Hoffman, We are the people our parents warned us against
The “Viking ideal; of a man who, in C.S. Lewis’s marvellous description, is ‘as stern to inflict as stubborn to endure.’”
Link Byfield in British Columbia Report December 20, 1993
“Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these.”
Ovid (43 B.C. to 18 A.D.) in Robert Byrne, ed., 1,911 Best things anybody ever said
In my latest Loonie Politics column I welcome the youth of tomorrow’s future back to the dismal reality of today’s schooling with an assignment to write an essay on what they’d really do if they were in charge, and why it would be so different from what they promised and expected to do.