In my latest National Post column I ask whether Jagmeet Singh and other prominent Canadian politicians can possibly be the buffoons they appear to be, and answer sadly yes.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the federal Liberals, including Katie Telford in her Friday non-testimony, are violating Robson’s First Rule of Crisis Management over Chinese election meddling: When criticism erupts, take time to ponder honestly whether you did something wrong.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say Justin Trudeau’s totally out-of-touch aristocratic remarks about borrowing via credit cards may finally bring him down politically.
“The best prophet of the future is the past.”
Lord Byron (whose advice I only take cautiously and in small amounts, to be sure), apparently in a letter written January 28, 1828 though my efforts to track it down did not lead to a confirmed specific attribution.
“As if to underline the national decline [in Britain in the 1970s ], every flailing industry flew the moth-eaten flag: British Steel, British Coal, British Leyland. They were all owned by the state – even the last, which was the national automobile manufacturer. The government had taken all the famous British car marques – Austin, Morris, Rover, Jaguar, Triumph – and merged them into one. That’s right: the government made your car. Or, rather, a man called Red Robbo did, when he was in the mood, which wasn’t terribly often.”
Obit of James Callaghan by Mark Steyn in The Atlantic Monthly June 2005.
“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.