"If he’s mad, I hope he’ll bite some of my other generals."
King George II responding to criticism of General James Wolfe, quoted by John Ivison in National Post June 12, 2012
“It was this century [the last before Christ] that produced most of the famous Romans whose names are familiar to us: the two Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Cicero, Caesar, and finally Augustus, all of whom helped in various ways to save Italy and the Empire from premature dissolution. It was, in fact, an age of great personalities, and one, too, in which personal character became as deeply interesting to the men of the time as it is even now to us.”
W. Warde Fowler, Rome.
In the latest issue of The Landowner I ridicule Britain’s Royal Academy for putting on a show of what Renaissance artists should have painted if they’d been smart, nice and sophisticated like us.
“Winston had 10 ideas every day, only one of which was good, and he did not know which it was."
General Sir Alan Brooke, Winston Churchill’s chief of staff, quoted by John Keegan in National Post August 29, 2002
"If there are commands of God, then there must be rights of man."
G.K. Chesterton in “The Empire of the Insect” in What’s Wrong with the World, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 12 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2009).
“The study of history brings to youth the experience that is lacking to it; it can help the adolescent to overcome his most usual temptation: to be exclusive, to condemn in advance some particular tendency, person, or group; to have a vision of the universe limited only to his own vision (and if only this were a matter merely of adolescents!). At the age when it is important to confront the values received – those of his surroundings, childhood, family, or social milieu – with his own personality, the study of history would enlarge the field of this investigation… By familiarizing oneself with other times, other eras, other civilizations, one acquires the habit of distrusting criteria of one’s own time…”
Régine Pernoud, Those Terrible Middle AgesPernoud TMA p. 170.