“Go back to the idea of government by ideas.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Revolt Against Ideas,” in The Thing, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #6 (4-5/07)
In my latest Epoch Times column I praise people for observing the externals of Christmas then urge them to open their hearts, minds and ears just a little wider while singing carols.
“With your usual rapid grasp of the inessentials, you regard the mushrooms as the most important element of Mr. Hillerman’s plan.”
A character in Jack Hitt, ed., The Perfect Murder
He had many dinners alone with General George Marshall during the war, after “two stiff, bourbon old-fashioneds which the Chief liked to mix himself. There would be talk of course, but absolutely no war talk. That day he probably had had to make decisions that affected the fate of nations; tomorrow he would face problems equally crucial. But that evening he would be calm and unworried as he listened to my chatting. Once, I asked him how he stood up under the strain; he answered: ‘I’ve had to train myself never to worry about a decision once it’s made. You worry before you make it, but not after. You make the best judgement you can about a problem – then forget it. If you don’t, your mind is not fit to make the next decision.’”
Frank Capra The Name Above the Title
“He [Harvard chaplain Peter J. Gomes] is surely right that extermination, conversion, and demoralizing relativism are not the only options. The best of options is a particular tradition with truth claims that exclude contradictory truth claims and include the truth claim that the dignity of the human person means that all human beings, no matter how erroneous their beliefs, are to be engaged with love and respect.”
Richard John Neuhaus in First Things December 2006 (#168)
This Thursday I told the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research (SRSR to insiders) to avoid getting distracted by issues like refining the criteria for federal funding of advanced research and instead to focus their limited resources including of time on core government responsibilities such as defence, infrastructure and justice that appear to be crumbling. Ironically my initial in-person appearance on Tuesday collapsed because they couldn’t make the translation work, which I thought rather proved my point about the state being overextended and lacking some fairly basic capacities. I think the concept of government doing less baffled many of the MPs. But you can watch my testimony given Thursday via videoconference starting at timecode 16:11:33 and judge for yourselves.
“But leadership is not just about getting the job done…. How many times have we read about a university athletic program that was excelling in athletics but was caught in a cheating scandal along the way? Or a financial institution that made its stockholders a lot of money but eventually collapsed because they violated the law? If as a leader you fail the institution you are leading, then you have failed – period. Once again, leadership is difficult, but not complicated. To do it right doesn’t require a sophisticated chart, a calculus formula, or a complex algorithm, but it does require some guidance.”
Author’s “Introduction” to William H. McRaven The Wisdom of the Bullfrog
“Kings needed help or counsel or money. They wanted assent to their policies and political support for them. These obvious facts should indeed receive due emphasis in any institutional history of the Middle Ages, but it is a delusion to suppose that, by merely calling attention to them, we are providing a sufficient explanation for the rise of medieval constitutionalism. The problem of maximizing assets to governmental policies arises for all rulers in all societies. It is not normally solved by the development of representative assemblies. Our argument is not that hard-headed medieval statesmen behaved in such-and-such a way because some theorist in a university had invented a theory saying that they ought to do so. The argument is rather that all men behave in certain ways in part at least because they adhere to certain ways of thinking. No doubt the ideas that are most influential in shaping actions are ones that the agent is hardly conscious of at all – he takes them so much for granted. But the historian has to make himself conscious of those ideas if he is to understand the men of a past age and the institutions that they created.”
Brian Tierney, “Medieval Canon Law and Western Constitutionalism,” in The Catholic Historical Review (Washington, April, 1966) excerpted in Bertie Wilkinson The Creation of Mediaeval Parliaments [and BTW Wilkinson was my grandfather].