“the fate of all mankind I see is in the hands of fools”
King Crimson “Epitaph” from In the Court of the Crimson King (1969)
In my latest Epoch Times column I ask how governments can aspire to fix the weather, the economy and our morals when they can’t even figure out how not to block all our driveways every time it snows hard.
“Lorsque notre haine est trop vive, elle nous met au-dessous de ceux que nous haïssons.”
La Rochefoucauld “Réflexions morales #338” in Maximes
“Here’s another one, in some ways summing it up, when we find in the first letter of John this very peculiar claim that God is love. I’ve said to you many times before, I think, that every religion, every philosophy of religion, would talk about the love that God has, that love is an attribute of God, that God loves some, or he loves as a typical activity or whatever. But there is no religion or philosophy that makes the truly strange claim that God is love, except Christianity.”
Bishop Robert Barron in an otherwise excellent sermon “To the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit - Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermon” posted June 3, 2023 [https://youtu.be/Ey2A8bvUk8Y?t=212] but for once I think he is wrong; I never heard that love is an attribute of God from the Aztecs, or even the ancient Greeks
“If you believe in a principle, never damage it with poor expression.”
Engineer Charles Parson, on why they risked arrest by taking the steam turbine ship Turbinia through the big naval review for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee to show that this kind of engine was much faster, quoted on “Incredible Speed: Turbinia” [https://youtu.be/rcQN9UxEEcM?t=336].
“Nothing in politics, the famous British historian F.S. Oliver remarked, is sadder than the ‘man of sterling character whose genius is so antipathetic to the particular emergency in which he finds himself as to stupefy his thoughts and paralyze his actions. He drifts to disaster, grappling blindfolded with forces which are beyond his comprehension, failing without really fighting. And yet had the difficulties been of some different order, they might have been much greater than they were, and he would have surmounted them victoriously.’”
David Frum Dead Right
“If there are ghastly things to be faced the only thing we can do is make it glorious to face them.”
GKC in New Witness May 17, 1918 quoted in Gilbert magazine Vol. 9 #2 (Oct.-Dec. 2005)
In my latest Epoch Times column, I say 2023 feels like one of those years where trouble was plainly a-brewin’ but the storm had not yet really broken.