In my latest Epoch Times column I say the answer to declining social trust, including on COVID lockdowns and vaccines, isn’t to shame and silence people, it’s to have an intelligent and respectful discussion. Which apparently now makes me a kook.
“It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations. The same motives always produce the same actions. The same events always follow from the same causes.”
David Hume, quoted in Richard Hofstadter The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It
“Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in the face of certain defeat.”
Ralph Ellison Invisible Man
“Even a paranoid can have enemies.”
Henry Kissinger, cited by Michiko Kukutani, “Bound by Suspicion,” The New York Times Magazine, January 1, 1997 and requoted in Quotes, Notes and Anecdotes (The Write File Quarterly) Spring 1997
In my latest Epoch Times column I remember, with some difficulty, that even a really annoying and disappointing election is a victory every time we vote freely and without fear.
“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