“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach us.”
Aldous Huxley quoted in Andrew Roberts “Introduction” in Andrew Roberts, ed., What Might Have Been (as from a letter written in 1959) and also by managing editor Geoffrey Stevens in Maclean’s April 19, 1999
In my latest National Post column I say the tricksy maneuvering over the U.S. debt ceiling, in which the one problem no one seems able address is chronic overspending, reminds me uncomfortably of late ancien régime France.
“We have been driven into a widespread system of arbitrary and tyrannical control over our economic life not because ‘economic laws are not working the way they used to,’ not because the classical medicine cannot, if properly applied, halt inflation, but because the public at large has been led to expect standards of performance that as economists we do not know how to achieve.”
Milton Friedman’s 1971 address to American Economic Association quoted in Leonard Silk The Economists
In my latest Epoch Times column I say our belated pro forma expulsion of one Chinese diplomat, then passively accepting their tit-for-tat, signals that we didn’t really mean it.
“Be discreet in all things, and so render it unnecessary to be mysterious about any.”
The Duke of Wellington according to AZ Quotes [https://www.azquotes.com/author/15482-Duke_of_Wellington]
“But when your sword breaks, you draw your dagger.”
Nikabrik [re using bad magic, however] in C.S. Lewis Prince Caspian
“‘Isaiah 11:6. The wolf shall dwell with the lamb: and the leopard shall lie down with the kid: the calf and the lion, and the sheep shall abide together, and a little child shall lead them.’ [Dr. Floriani notes: Unless I am gravely mistaken (and have lost all grasp of the printed word) this is the verse often quoted (I mean mis-quoted) as “And the lion shall lie down with the lamb” which does not occur in Scripture.]”
“GKC on Scripture * Conducted by Peter Floriani” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (September-October 2022).
“An insubordinate clause.”
Another of mine, from February 4, 2004, about an impertinent remark.