“Of his eighteen years as emperor Septimius gave twelve to war. He destroyed his rivals in a swift and savage campaigns; he razed Byzantium after four years’ siege, thereby lowering the barrier to the spreading Goths; he invaded Parthia, took Ctesiphon, annexed Mesopotamia, and hastened the fall of the Arsacid kings. In his old age, suffering from gout but fretful lest his army deteriorate through five years of peace, he led an expedition into Caledonia. After expensive victories against the Scots he withdrew into Britain, and retired to York to die (211). ‘I have been everything,’ he said, ‘and it is worth nothing.’”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“For, ex hypothesi, he is as insensible to all rational argument as a horny-hided Siegfried, dipped in the flood of incapacity, and unable to think or judge.”

Arthur Schopenhauer, “The Art of Controversy,” in Jack E. Conner & Marcelline Krafchick Speaking of Rhetoric [condescendingly, the reference is to an ordinary man as an opponent in argument but I treasure the phrase “dipped in the flood of incapacity”]

“The devil wouldn’t be attacking you so hard if there wasn’t something valuable inside of you. Thieves don’t break into empty houses.”

Emailed by a friend without further attribution

In my latest appearance on Rebel News I discuss Prime Minister Mark Carney’s decision to embrace evil in the Middle East with Ezra Levant.

“GAUGUIN AND OTHER EXPERIMENTAL ARTISTS have devoted themselves not merely to the study of savage subjects, but to some extent to the imitation of savage art. Some of them, or some of their imitators, have deliberately set out not merely to paint Hottentots, but to paint as badly as Hottentots would paint. Some of them look as if they had succeeded. I suppose Gauguin would not approve of his own imitators, for he said, ‘In art one is a revolutionary or a plagiarist.’ Remembering the old schools and traditions, we might answer that the great artists have been the plagiarists.”

G.K. Chesterton “Gauguin and the Art of the Savage” reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024) [and if Gaugin’s dictum were true it would leave very little room for anyone actually to do art]

In my latest Epoch Times column I say Canadian authorities’ feeble justifications for cancelling concerts because they don’t like the singer or the lyrics show just how little they understand free speech… or even think about it.

“Once men had sublimated their longing for grandeur and continuance in the glory and survival of their family and their clan, and then of a state that was their creation and collective self. Now the old clan lines were melting away in the new mobility of peace; and the imperial state was the spiritual embodiment only of the master class, not of the powerless multitude of men. Monarchy at the top, frustrating the participation and merger of the citizen in the state, produced individualism at the bottom and through the mass. The promise of personal immortality, of an endless happiness after a life of subjection, poverty, tribulation, or toil, was the final and irresistible attraction of the oriental faiths and of the Christianity that summarized, absorbed, and conquered them. All the world seemed conspiring to prepare the way for Christ.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ, end of Chapter XXIV [though he was too worldly a modern to notice what he just said let alone take it seriously.

“Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?”

Jeremiah 12:1 [King James Bible].