“‘His imperfections flowed from the contagion of the times: his virtues were his own.’“
Edward Gibbon on Belisarius, cited in George F. Kennan American Diplomacy 1900-1950
In my latest Epoch Times column I heckle an entire Parliament full of people who didn’t know who fought who in World War II, that guests for a high-security speaker should be vetted or just about anything else.
“Industry makes work go well, but a man who puts off work is always at hand-grips with ruin.”
Hesiod, quoted in Maclean’s July 28, 2003
“The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”
“Thomas Jefferson (Summary View of the Rights of British America, August 1774)” quoted as The Federalist Patriot “Founder’s Quote Daily” for July 8, 2005 from Federalist.com
“The point is, however, that the West [in the Cold War] got the ‘big thing’ right and the lesser matters right enough. Many of history’s losers, not excluding Nazi Germany and the USSR, failed to get the really big things right although they did perform some ill chosen missions extremely well. If one had to choose, it would be preferable to pursue the correct policy inelegantly than the incorrect policy elegantly.”
Colin S. Gray Canadians in a Dangerous World
In my latest Epoch Times column I say Justin Trudeau accusing India of carrying out a “hit” in Canada needs to be backed by evidence the public is allowed to see rather than his usual hyperbolic petulance.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the Peel District School Board purging all books written before 2008 is a worrying red flag about what’s happening in government schools… and I do mean red.
“David S. Muzzey put the problem well when he compared the individual to the waist of an hour-glass, standing ‘at the apex of a pyramid whose base broadens downward through descendants at the apex of a pyramid whose base broadens upward through ancestors’. In Muzzey’s image, every historically significant man is ‘focal’, gathering the experience of the past into himself and sending forth ‘widening rays of influence’ into the future. ‘The task of the biographer,’ he concluded, is ‘to calculate the resultant of the forces’, which consist of the personality of the subject and ‘the problems of the times in which he lived’.”
John A. Garratty The Nature of Biography