“Current fashion among history teachers affirms, in the teeth of the evidence, that individuals count for little; that history’s iron laws are all but unaffected by them.”
The Making of Tyrants by Alan Bullock, quoted in The Economist July 20, 1991
“Irresolute men are sometimes very persistent in their undertakings, because if they gave up their design they would have to make a second resolution.”
“Leopardi” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail May 18, 2007
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say sending an underarmed Arctic patrol vessel to Cuba to greet a Russian flotilla, then babbling a shifting set of unconvincing and inconsistent explanations, is one more example of the plague of incompetence engulfing us.
“Cleopatra’s nose: if it had been shorter the whole face of the earth would have been different.”
Pascal Pensées
In my latest Mercatornet column I ask how the United States, of all places, could have become vulnerable to tyranny.
“Antisemitism is both a sort of mental impairment and a barrier to learning. If you think that ‘the Jews’ control the banks, you don’t understand finance, and will never understand it because you have this happy conspiracy theory and you think you already know everything. If you think ‘the Jews’ control the weather with their space lasers, you’re not going to bother to study meteorological science. A society in which this kind of antisemitism is prevalent is not going to be a sign of a society on the cutting edge of science or business or economics or anything else. In our society, these beliefs are toxic. They’re terrible for Jews, but they are actually poison to what makes America, America.”
Walter Russell Mead in conversation with Bari Weiss on The Free Press October 31, 2023 [https://www.thefp.com/p/are-we-tipping-into-world-war-three].
“Modern man is in a terrible predicament. He is helplessly enamored with the beauty of what the old world built, yet despises the beliefs that inspired them to build it.”
Post on X by Culture Critic (@Culture_Crit) October 12, 2023 [https://twitter.com/Culture_Crit/status/1712522023048520098].
“To [British novelist Graham] Swift, history is not an abstract force but, as he puts it, the story ‘of how little people lived through big things.’”
A writer whose name I did not record in Maclean’s May 6, 1996