"early on the 23rd, we left the bloodstained heights of the Alma – a name that will be ever memorable in history.
Nicholas Bentley, ed., Russell’s Dispatches from the Crimea
"In War: Resolution, In Defeat: Defiance, In Victory: Magnanimity, In Peace: Goodwill"
The moral of his The Second World War according to Winston Churchill
"Winston Churchill once described the Balkans as a region that produced more history than it could consume."
Carol Off The Ghosts of Medak Pocket
"We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile."
Hilaire Belloc, quoted in “The Catholic Buckley” in George William Rutler He Spoke to Us, saying they were "written after gazing upon the ruins of Timgad in North Africa, a city destroyed by the Vandals”
"It is really a strange thing that there should not be room enough in the world for men to live, without cutting one another’s throats."
George Washington, in W.B. Allen, ed., Washington: A Collection
In my latest National Post column I dismiss various criticisms and call Prince Harry's engagement to Meghan Markle a good thing including the amazing progress in race relations it reflects.