Posts in History
Words Worth Noting - August 22, 2024

“We do not merely study the past: we inherit it, and the inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship. Things fought for and died for should not be idly squandered. For they are the property of others, who are not yet born.”

Roger Scruton, emailed by a friend and widely quoted online

Words Worth Noting - August 21, 2024

“When it [Queen’s University] opened its first classes in 1842, its first professor, the Reverend Peter Colin Campbell, taught classical literature. In its Memorial Room to the school’s war dead, there is an inscription around the wall, from Wordsworth, another provocative conditional: ‘We must be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold which Milton held.’”

Joseph Brean in National Post January 26, 2024 [heckling the way Queen’s was handling its funding crisis].

Words Worth Noting - August 19, 2024

“An eagle hunts no flies.”

A Saxon proverb over the desk of Col. Hans Oster, head of Department Z (HQ and central registry) of the Abwehr and an important member of the Schwarze Kapelle according to Anthony Cave Brown, Bodyguard of Lies: The Exraordinary, True Story of the Clandestine War of Deception that Hid the Secrets of D-Day from Hitler and Sealed the Allied Victory [he calls Oster “A Saxon horse gunner who was at once elegant and arrogant” and says he was openly contemptuous of Hitler and the Nazis.