“It is better to be defeated than to confess defeat in advance.”
William Jennings Bryan in a letter to his brother Charles in 1920, quoted in Robert W. Cherny, A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan
“Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.”
Abraham Lincoln, quoted in the American Spectator August 1988
They describe rural New Hampshire churches in March 1968 with spires “pointing the way toward salvation and a God who was, by most current accounts, either dead or hiding out in Argentina. It was going to be a bad year.”
William W. Prochenau & Richard W. Larsen, A Certain Democrat: Senator Henry M. Jackson A Political Biography
In my latest National Post column I call Erin O’Toole’s flipflop on gun control a test case of whether populism, as one way of making the electoral system more responsive to popular wishes, actually brings better or more honest policy.
In my latest National Post column I argue that the solution to toxic anger in politics, far easier said than done, is neither to cause nor succumb to it.
In my latest Epoch Times column I deplore the spectacle of the Trudeau ministry treating the tragically botched evacuation from Kabul airport as yet another occasion for lavish self-praise.
In my latest National Post column I summon the shade of former U.S. President and master of Realpolitik Richard M. Nixon to discuss the ominous parallel implications of the collapse of the Afghan and Vietnamese missions for Western credibility in the world.
“Is there a possibility that the government of nations may fall into the hands of men who teach the most disconsolate of all creeds, that men are but fireflies, and that this all is without a father?”
John Quincy Adams, in the Letters of Publicola, quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind [Kirk added that the specific target was Thomas Paine and that Adams went on that rather than such an outcome “Give us again the gods of the Greeks.”]