“What is being asked of me is clear. Whether I have the talent and understanding sufficient to accomplish the task is God’s affair.”
A remark attributed to "the young Otto von Bismarck... upon receiving a very delicate diplomatic mission in his early twenties" according to a writer whose name I did not record in Commentary March 1990
In my latest Epoch Times column I say there’s a lot more sense in certain calls to “Defund the police” than you might think or than some advocates exhibit.
In my latest Mercatornet column I say people should be sad and compassionate not vindictive over racism and riots in the United States and elsewhere.
“For it is only the love of honour that never grows old; and honour it is, not gain, as some would have it, that rejoices the heart of age and helplessness.”
Thucydides quoting Pericles’ “Funeral Oration” from The Peloponnesian War (an online version; other translations exist, obviously)
“It is quite easy to give people a second nature, if you catch them early enough. There is no belief, however grotesque and even villainous, that cannot be made a part of human nature if it is inculcated in childhood and not contradicted in the child’s hearing.”
George Bernard Shaw Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism (he cites foot-binding, ritual suicide when the king dies and suttee).