Posts in History
Words Worth Noting - October 10, 2023

“Quite honestly, I can’t imagine how anyone can say: ‘I’m weak,’ and then remain so. After all, if you know it, why not fight against it, why not try to train your character? The answer was: ‘Because it’s so much easier not to!’ This reply rather discouraged me. Easy? Does that mean that a lazy, deceitful life is an easy life? Oh, no, that can’t be true, it mustn’t be true, people can so easily be tempted by slackness... and by money.”

The diary entry for July 6, 1944 in The Diary of Anne Frank [prompted by a conversation with Peter Van Daan who said he thought he might later become a criminal or a gambler]

Words Worth Noting - October 5, 2023

“I call these men [the Framers of the Constitution] heroes in deliberate defiance of the ban placed upon this word by most serious-minded historians. By hero I mean a leader of men who engages with clear eye and stout heart in an uncertain enterprise for some purpose larger than the gratification of his own ambition or the rewarding of his own friends, and whose deeds work a benevolent influence on the lives of countless other men.”

Clinton Rossiter The Grand Convention (and it was written in 1966 so this morale-destroying ban has been in place for a long time).

The unbearable ignorance of politicians

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say if a typical MP could not pass a pop quiz on World War II or almost any subject, and voters and journalists don’t notice, it’s way past time we stopped letting the state run our education system.