“In this life we get nothing save by effort.”
Theodore Roosevelt, “In Praise of the Strenuous Life,” in William Bennett The Book of Virtues
“There is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in “Quote of the Week in “The Week That Was: 2011-11-20” on Watt’s Up With That (https://wattsupwiththat.com)
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the chattering classes have no business mocking a truckers’ convoy for not understanding how government works when they’ve forgotten too.
“just as historians tell us that Richard I was not fit to fill the shoes of bold Henry II – and that Richard Cromwell was not fit to wear the mantle of his uncle – they might add in future years that Richard Nixon did not measure to the footsteps of Dwight D. Eisenhower.”
John F. Kennedy’s nomination acceptance speech July 16, 1960 (the irony being that the metaphor only works if we have some idea who these people were, yet JFK didn’t realize Richard “Tumble-Down Dick” Cromwell was not Oliver’s nephew but his son, or that Oliver Cromwell’s “mantle” is not something you would want to have fit you).
In my latest National Post column, while acknowledging the world-historic greatness of Justin Trudeau now that he has emergency powers, I ask whether our governments’ manifest incapacity to do even simple things including fixing health care derives from having long ago substituted make-believe for serious thought.
In my latest Epoch Times column I ask whether a government invoking emergency powers over protest crowdfunding has any interest in getting after literally hundreds of billions in dirty money being laundered in plain sight in Canada.
In my latest Mercatornet column I warn that the divisions over the protest convoy reflect a collapse of trust in Canadian society that will not be healed by both sides acting untrustworthy.
“The moment a thing has ceased to be a paradox it is in immediate peril of becoming a platitude. It is in peril of becoming one of those things that are accepted ‘in principle’ by all unprincipled men.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #11 (September-October 2021)