“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
English novelist L.P. Hartley, quoted in Sylvan Barnet’s “Overview” in the 1986 Signet Classic edition of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar [in Policy Options November 2002 historian Desmond Morton called him “an otherwise obscure English novelist”].
“At age seven, the much-tutored [future Queen] Victoria was reading British classics, perfecting her German and learning French. However, her frustrated piano master one day noted, ‘There is no royal road to music, Princess. You must practise like everybody else.’ Victoria slammed the piano shut. ‘There! You see there is no must about it!’”
Donna Jacobs “Monday Morning” in Ottawa Citizen May 21, 2007
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
Henry Ford on the witness stand in 1919 during his libel suit against the Chicago Tribune, quoted in Clifton Fadiman, ed., The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes [which as I may have complained before was in fact big and blue]. These words are the apparently origin of his supposed “History is bunk”, and I quote them not because I agree but on the contrary because they embodies a typical progressive fatuity that nothing ever mattered before yet what we do can matter by sheer force of will... and because I want to add that in The Illusion of Technique William Barrett quoted it as “History is the bunk”, which I find interesting because older uses of that term invariably seem to have it as “the bunk” and if anyone knows how or why it got shortened or what the original reference even was I would be interested.
“Evil ideas are at the root of all this enormous evil which plagues the world at present.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 2, 1917, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)
In my latest Mercatornet article I say that what matters in the upcoming U.S. election is not what the people involved would have you focus on.
“‘The Woman King’ may not be 100% factual. But that doesn’t stop it from being a must-see./ Some have criticized it for not telling the full extent to which the Dahomey kingdom participated in the slave trade, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a powerful film.”
Headline and deck on NBC “Think” “Culture & Lifestyle” piece September 16, 2022 [www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/the-woman-king-may-not-be-100-percent-factual-but-its-a-must-see-rcna48103] and which I quote, obviously, not because I sympathize but because I think it’s a characteristically unashamed modern assertion that if it advances a favoured cause the fact that it’s not true is of no importance.
“Lord Salisbury’s observation that ‘no lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust in experts’”
Michael Mandelbaum in New York Times June 16, 1985 [and widely quoted online but not, in any examples I found, with further attribution as to when or where Salisbury said it].
“‘Those who can, do,’ but the converse, ‘those who do, can,’ is no less true, for we learn by doing.”
Anthony De Jasay The State (expressly regarding the possibility that we couldn’t spontaneously cooperate any more because we’ve lived under governments for so long).