In my latest Epoch Times column I suggest in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination that we all ask ourselves whether our own interventions in public debate are designed to lead people back to the light or drive them further into the darkness.
“The initial Canadian Expeditionary force of twenty thousand [in World War I] was organized by Sam Hughes, who was, as Borden informed him, ‘beset by two unceasing enemies. Expecting a revelation, he was intensely disappointed when I told him that they were his tongue and his pen.’”
Conrad Black Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present
“Accept people as they are, but place them where they belong. You are the CEO of your life. Hire, fire & promote accordingly.”
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“The burden of existence calls for a commensurate justification of our being. The fact that we are alive, that we have agency, that we are capable of such tremendous heights and depths emotionally, that our minds have such a capacity for love and creation and reason, that our subjective experiences appear to have irreducible meaning and value despite the fact that they are subjective – all of these things burden us. The beauty and goodness of our particular being demands some justification: What right do I have to such a life? Without a justification, we feel like phonies, frauds, failures, or, at best, lost.”
Alan Noble Disruptive Witness
“Far more renowned than Strabo in his time was Dio Chrysostom – Dio of the Golden Mouth (A.D. 40-120)... Dio left behind him eighty orations. For us today they contain more wind than meat; they suffer from empty amplification, deceptive analogies, and rhetorical tricks; they stretch half an idea to half a hundred pages... ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said the honest Trajan, ‘but I love you as myself.’... Probably what drew people to him was not his fine Attic Greek, but the courage of his denunciations. Almost alone in pagan antiquity he condemned prostitution; and few writers of his time so openly attacked the institution of slavery. (He was a bit vexed, however, when he found that his slaves had run away.)”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“David Foster Wallace famously described this background belief: ‘Everything in my own immediate experience supports my belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realist, most vivid and important person in existence.’ Although Wallace refers to this basic belief as ‘hard-wired,’ I think a more historically informed take is that while we naturally perceive the world through our own experiences, the sense that we are the absolute centre of the universe was much more difficult to believe in the 1400s, when the universe was seen as a cosmos with God at the centre. The temptation is to believe that the way we experience life today is fundamentally the same as someone six hundred years ago except for our material conditions, but the image of ourselves as the authoritative interpreters and protagonists in the story of existence is a fundamentally modern construct. This construct involves a movement we need to challenge if we are to address a distracted, secular age.”
Alan Noble Disruptive Witness
“Sam Hughes, at militia, was a human grenade with the pin pulled…”
Part of his assessment of Robert Borden’s cabinet in Conrad Black Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present
“The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation.”
Mark Twain quoted in Tony Robbins Unlimited Power