“Economic systems come and go like fashions in surgery and in the clothes of women, and during the nineteenth century the Mercantile System was discarded in favour of a system of free and open competition. At least, so I have been told.”
Hendrick Van Loon The Story of Mankind
“people often ask me, well don’t you have faith in anything? And I always have the same answer, I do have one unshakable [faith], and that is I have an unshakable [faith] in the unreliability of man. I know that no matter what we do, some damn fool will make a mess of it.”
Garrett Hardin, quoted in Julian Simon Hoodwinking the Nation
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
John Milton, quoted in the introduction to the fence-whitewashing excerpt from Mark Twain Tom Sawyer in William Bennett The Book of Virtues
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
John McCrae In Flanders Fields
“You fail to overlook the crucial point.”
Samuel Goldwyn, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #2 Oct.-Nov. 2002
“Common sense, that extinct branch of psychology.”
G.K. Chesterton “The Unpsychological Age” in Alvaro De Silva ed., Brave New Family
In my latest Mercatornet piece I say Trump remains popular with many Americans because despite everything he has gotten some important policies very right.
In my latest Loonie Politics column, I say the U.S. midterms were pretty much an ugly draw, their Constitution still works, and life goes on because politics isn’t as important as politicians and pundits often claim.