“When this is all over, look for massive confirmation bias and pyrrhic celebration by elites. There will be vain cheering in the halls of power as Main Street sits in pieces. Expect no apology, that would be political suicide. Rather, expect to be given a Jedi mind trick of ‘I’m the government and I helped.’”
The much derided Aaron Ginn had a point in March 2020
…it’s good to remember that for every insufferable snob in England, there’s an equally insufferable inverted snob in Scotland
Madeleine Kearns, Standpoint, 22/05/20
“The only means to fight the plague is honesty”
Albert Camus, La Peste, 1947
A pandemic is a deadly serious business. But we would do well to remember that bureaucracies have their own interests, quite apart from the public interest that is their official brief and warrant
Matthew Crawford, Unherd, 15/05/20
We can make shift to live under a debauchee or even under a tyrant, but to be ruled by a busybody is more than human nature can bear
Thomas Macaulay
We have learned to recognize, to esteem, and often to admire our doctors, caregivers, and researchers. This is a boon during this sinister springtime. We have also discovered the politics of science, which is no more innocent than regular politics. Expertise provides no immunity against the desire for power
Pierre Manent, French political scientist, Le Figaro, 23/04/20
…there is a small group of people taking the responsibility, making the tough decisions, trying to listen to a variety of “experts” (who invariably are all over the map and working from wrong or incomplete data), and there are the nitpicking and contradictory snipers, blamers, and attention junkies
Ammo Grrrll, over at PowerLine, describing the Coronavirus crisis in the states, 10/04/20. Sound familiar?
Elizabeth Warren reminds me of somebody’s grandma who ruined the Thanksgiving turkey and ran out of meds in the same disastrous afternoon.
EM Cadwaladr, American Thinker, 26/02/20
The EU spends its ossified budget wastefully, even egregiously. Over 40 per cent of expenditures are for agricultural subsidies.
Ashoka Mody, Spectattor Coffee House, 18/02/20
Remainerism is not a political ideology so much as a cultural identity. It is a mechanism for moral distinction. It is a means of distancing oneself from the problematic little people and from populism — which, as the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us, merely means ‘policies or principles… which seek to represent the interests of ordinary people’
Brendan O’Neill, Spectator Coffee House, 27/01/20
‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea’.
Samuel Johnson
“When stupidity seems a sufficient explanation, there is no need for recourse to any more elaborate analysis.”
Michael Martin Uhlmann, Requiescat in pace.
The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs
George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872
In its historic heartlands the end of Labour can’t come soon enough. It is a stillborn populist movement that has mummified hideously into a metropolitan protest group. Its story is tragic. Within 30 years of its launch,ch, bohemian Bolshebvism had smother the hopeful pragmatism of its rank-and-file. But if socialism crushed Labour’s spirit, Blairism sucked out its soul
Sherelle Jacobs, Daily Telegraph, 14/11/19
…the hardcore hypocrisy of racist, misogynist Corbynites who believe that they can never do wrong because they have ticked the box marked Brotherhood Of Man
Julie Burchill, Spectator, 18/11/19
”Wherever an altar is found, there civilisation exists.”
Joseph de Maistre
I won’t claim to understand the intricacies of British politics, but here is how Brexit looks from America: it looks like a great mass of people trying to throw off the rule and influence of a foreign, imperious power in the EU. And here is how Remain looks: like loyalists trying to maintain this rule and keep the coin and cachet they derive from things staying roughly the way that they are right now.
Jeremy Lott, Spectator, 12/11/19
…what appears legal is not necessarily legitimate …. being in office but not in power produces the worst kind of tyranny
Nizam al-Mulk, 11th century Persian statesman
The Houthis, the Assad clan, Hezbollah, PMF and kindred groups are puppets in a surrealistic show scripted by faceless puppet-masters in Tehran
Amir Taheri, Gatestone Institute, 03/11/19
Consider the enormity of this. The Prime Minister is facing prison if he dares to attempt implementing something which was promised in the General Election manifestos of both main parties, endorsed by Parliament, and — more importantly — voted for in a referendum by the largest single number of people in our history.
Richard Littlejohn, Daily Mail, 09/09/19
There are many Remainers who would feel perfectly at home in Bratislava or Vilnius – yet have little knowledge of, say, Scunthorpe. Their world revolves around the centres of capitals and other large cities. It does not include industrial towns, remote rural places of even the suburbia of major cities. They are not ‘Anywhere’; they are ‘Anywhere with a Prada’.
Ross Clark, Spectator Coffee House, 09/09/19
Democracy only worked, first in the US and later in the UK and other countries, because the power of government to make laws – for good or for bad – was limited by the rule of law. The rule of law isn’t primarily about regulating the behaviour of ordinary citizens. It’s about regulating the behaviour of the government…
…The law must not be used to thwart the popular will.
Salvatore Babones, Spiked!, 30/08/19
Sir Richard Evans, formerly Regius professor of History at Cambridge, has done his best in the past few days to prove the saying that there is no one so stupid as an intellectual.
Andrew Roberts, Mail on Sunday, 01/09/19
The question of what exactly we are meant to do now – other than get rich and have fun – was going to have to be answered by something. The answer that has presented itself in recent years has been to live in a permanent state of outrage
Douglas Murray, Mail on Sunday, 01/09/19
The General Election of 1929, 110 years after the march to St Peter’s Field, was the first election in which all adults had the right to vote….
…That the 200th anniversary of Peterloo coincides with the largest assault on British democracy in living memory – the assault on Brexit – points to the unfinished business of the struggle for democracy.
Brendan O’Neill, Spiked!, 16/08/19
It should be clear to the meanest intelligence that if there were any economic case for EU membership, the EU (an overtly political project) would not be the world’s economic basket-case, which it is.
Nigel Lawson, The Spectator, 03/08/19
“..if I have seen further than others it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs”.
Murray Gell-Mann
I am simply of the opinion that we need to leave the EU, as the public asked, and can foresee no economic or social situation so dire that it is worse than the societal repercussions that would follow from overriding the public vote.
Douglas Murray, Spectator Coffee House, 31/07/19
“..when political science is severed from its ancient rootage in the humanities and ‘enriched’ by the wisdom of sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists, the result is frequently a pre-occupation with minutiae which obscures the grand and tragic outlines of contemporary history, and offers vapid solutions for profound problems.”
Reinhold Niebuhr, 1952
Private Eye, in recent times, had become ‘95 per cent groupthink and devoid of satire’
Christopher Booker (a founder) quoted in Spiked online, 05/07/19
Put yourselves on the ways of long ago and enquire about the ancient paths: which was the good way? Take it then, and you shall find rest.
Jeremiah 6:16 (from ~2,600 years ago)
The sort of person who names Love Actually as his favourite film before you’ve even finished asking the question.
Henry Deedes describes Jeremy Hunt, Daily Mail, 12/07/19
‘Mozart is a garden; Schubert is a forest – in sunlight and shadow; Beethoven is a mountain range’
Artur Schnabel
Freedom of speech cannot survive a partial defence
Stephen Daisley, Spectator, 14/06/19
At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child — miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosophy of sniveling brats.
PJ O’Rourke, Give War A Chance, 1992
There’s another one of those sentences I thought I’d never read, let alone write.
Richard Littlejohn, Daily Mail, 11/06/19
The Liberal Democrats are neither liberal nor democratic. Their role is simply to provide a temporary haven for voters repelled by the behaviour of the other parties.
Frank Furedi, Spiked!, 10/06/19
As a result of a functional deficiency in critical thinking and other intellectual skills, the intellectually mediocre individual parrots the prevailing social and political paradigms, and uncritically accepts the dogma of the day and standards of political correctness.
Academy of Ideas, 2017
Anthony Blair (as his wife used to refer to him until he adopted the name ‘Tony’ to make him more appealing to Labour voters) was and remains a rather boring, ordinary, vague man with a limited mind….
…politics has never really been his main interest. He went into the power game because he had failed as a barrister
Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday, 02/06/19
These legal principles are not arcane, little-known concepts. Nevertheless, they seem to have eluded former FBI Director Mueller and his band of angry law school graduates
George Parry, American Spectator, 01/06/19
George Orwell’s socialist tyrants worked hard to impose what he called “doublethink,” but today’s left can’t even manage singlethink.
Kurt Schlichter, Townhall.com, 27/05/19
“The Brussels Commission thinks only about building a free market in the service of the great financial powers. The European Union no longer protects the peoples within it. It protects the banks.”
Cardinal Robert Sarah
The Church really is the last major bastion in the world that stands for the sanity of normal mankind. Its enemies, and it has enemies, recognize the importance of capturing the “image” of a Church about to change, about to embrace modernity in all its glory and goriness. I think that Pope Francis has learned a lot in his first year in the papacy. What is missing is what Benedict and John Paul II understood, namely, the importance of intellect in this whole analysis of what needs to be done.
the late James Schall, SJ.
The alleged citadels of secular reason — the universities — are the most irrational and morally confused institutions in the West.
Dennis Prager, Townhall.com, 16/04/19
I do not get my news from CNN for the same reason that I don’t eat out of the toilet
Roger Stone, The Spectator, 13/04/19
“One definition of good journalism is printing things that someone does not want printed. Independence is an indispensable quality for anyone who would be a writer, that is, indispensable for finding one’s own voice.”
the late Jeffrey Hart
‘A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad.’
Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, 590AD
“Atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method…Atheism is a belief in non-belief. So you categorically deny something you have no evidence against…I’ll keep an open mind because I understand that human knowledge is limited.”
Marcelo Gleiser, agnostic and Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Dartmouth College
“The more reviled you are, the more written off you are by all of the cool kids, the more likely you are to be saying at least something that’s true”
Tucker Carlson, 29/03/19
…reporters will print it, and editors will shrug, because that’s what the press is now—a pass-through mechanism mostly used for manipulative, ill-informed and often nonsensical propaganda
Lee Smith, Tablet, 27/03/19. He means the US, but the UK isn’t far behind
Beto’s “primary political commitment is to the idea that he, personally, should be in power.”
New York Post editorial, 24/03/19
This has gone beyond Brexit now. What is at stake is nothing less than the legitimacy of our system of representative government. If MPs are seen to have sided with overseas powers against their own constituents, nothing will ever be the same again.
Dan Hannan, Washington Examiner, 15/03/19
They were, pretty much to a man and a woman, on the make. And they loved, loved the EU.
David Starkey describes Blair and his coterie, Mail on Sunday, 17/03/19
Innumerable economic projects lie fallow because the load of taxation would make them unprofitable. . .
Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, 1922
Endangered species of snails, worms, and rodents in theory earn more protection from radical progressives than do third-trimester unborn babies and delivered infants, who can be deemed without legal protection.
Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review, 25/02/19
…eight years under the rule of a lazy, incurious dauphin and eight years of a former community organizer who was both incompetent and malign..
A brief yet accurate history lesson from Bruce Bawer, PJ Media 15/02/19
Obama is a bad man in terms of the Constitution.
The late, and very great, Nat Hentoff, jazz hero and thinker
For the common run of mankind, I suspect, the highest earthly pleasure is self-righteous moral infatuation
Roger Kimball, Imprimis, February 2019
Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.
Thoreau
Under President Barack Obama, the Constitution was violated more wantonly than a goat at a Taliban bachelor party, and the faithful cheered every violation.
Jack Cashill, American Thinker, 18/02/19
The case against a single-payer health-care system is not only, or principally, its cost. It is that government-enforced monopolies are undesirable for other reasons, from their propensity to abuse their monopoly positions to the fact that they cultivate an attitude of dependency — which also can be exploited for political purposes.
Kevin D Williamson basically describes the NHS, in NRO, 20/01/19
Already the period from 1973 to today begins to look like a quite short, strange aberration in our long story
Charles Moore, The Spectator, 19/01/19
‘It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house for the voice of a Kingdom.’
Jonathan Swift
He remains an outsider, who has never been in government, is frightened of responsibility and at a time of national crisis prefers carping from the sidelines to getting involved in working out a solution.
Andrew Gimson on the dismal Corbyn, CapX, 17/01/19
“He could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much. No one is able to counter this guy in an intelligent way.”
Film maker David Lynch, on Trump. The last sentence is true
A person who needs his fingers to tell you 2+2=4 should not be designing a bridge. The most dangerous of morons will insist that they not only should design that bridge, but are entitled to design that bridge.
William L Gensert, American Thinker, 10/01/19
“To seek ‘causes’ of poverty is an intellectual dead end, because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.”
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961
Homer has more to teach us about governance than Harvard, and always will.
Michael Walsh, American Spectator, 19/06/18
It is not inequality that enrages people, but indifference or disdain toward them as human beings.
Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal, Autumn 2018
You can shun publicity and still be hugely famous, and you can be hugely famous and not be obnoxious about it. This is an achievement of a very high order.
Andrew Ferguson on Bob Dylan, The Weekly Standard, 14/10/16
Macron won’t and can’t change. He has not a trace of humility in his personality and while this may have worked for General de Gaulle, he can neither carry it off nor can such a personality survive an onslaught by social media, which in France is consumed with ridiculing and disparaging the president.
Jonathan Miller, Spectator USA, 03/11/18
Cory Booker has all the gravitas of a cork
Camille Paglia,Spectator USA, 04/12/18
..one thing that emerges from polling data the authors have compiled over decades was how well Remain did to get to 48 percent. If anything, Euroscepticism is the UK’s default position, and “Project Fear” probably shifted 5–10 percent of people inclined to vote Leave across to the Remain column
Helen Dale, Quillette.com, 04/12/18
Elite Remainers, such as Tony Blair and the editors of the Financial Times and The Economist, are more candid. They accept these restraints on U.K. sovereignty because they have already made the psychological leap from allegiance to the United Kingdom to loyalty to an emerging European state. They are in fact EU nationalists, or EU imperialists
John O’Sullivan, National Review Online, 27/11/18
The government, as we now know, has not really been trying to leave the EU at all, but to stay in it
Robert Tombs, historian, Spiked online, 23/11/18
The French say many silly things, along with a few wise ones, although since the deaths of Voltaire, Descartes, and la Rochefoucauld, not lately
Michael Walsh, American Greatness, 14/11/18
They were starting to learn German in Paris before the U.S. came along
Donald Trump’s rough and ready history lesson, Twitter, 13/11/18
It is pointless to guess at what more he might have achieved. He did enough.
Robert Schumann describing Schubert, who died aged 31
‘Anti-Zionism’ has been the preferred justification for Jew-hatred in institutions of education and within progressive activism for a long time. Now it’s coming for politics
David Harsanyi, New York Post, 11/11/18
Coltrane’s quartet is the Moby-Dick of American popular music
Dominic Green, The Weekly Standard, 26/08/18
From that combined culture of totalitarianism and relativism comes in the end a Leviathan state that swallows up safety just as readily as it devours freedom.
George Neumayr, American Spectator, 09/11/18
True religion is slow in growth and, when once planted, is difficult of dislodgement; but its intellectual counterfeit has no root in itself; it springs up suddenly, it suddenly withers
John Henry Newman describes climate change, I’d suggest, amongst many other hysterical movements
In 2018 our ruling class, in unison, set out to destroy all but the biological life of a political adversary. It substituted vehement assertion for truth, cast aside argument, foreclosed questions, celebrated its own deed and vowed to persist in it.
Angelo Codivilla
“The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful must take himself perpetually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable, renascent errors.”
Charles Peguy
In whichever way I might like to relate my life to the rest of the world, my path takes me across a great battlefield; unless I enter upon it, no permanent happiness can be mine
Carl von Clausewitz
“I lingered a little and left the world.”
St Francis of Assisi
“Peace and Freedom are not to be taken for granted”
..the legendary Joachim Ronneberg, war hero and saboteur supreme
When the media become unctuous and complicit with those whom they are supposed to audit and cross-examine, then politicians and political movements—especially those voicing utopian bromides—grow ever more emboldened, empowered and occasionally quite dangerous
Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness, 14/10/18
To stop Donald Trump, the Democrats have tossed out the whole basis of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence — innocent until proven guilty.
Ben Stein, American Spectator, 27/09/18
“reading well is in itself an act of virtue, and it is also a habit that cultivates more virtue in return.”
Karen Prior, professor of English
“Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. It rests notably, among others, on the idea of Fidelity.”
Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record, 1912
I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.
Albert Einstein
“When someone says they want to kill you, believe them.”
Eli Wiesel
Politicized art is worthless; but art that has political resonance generally stands the test of time.
A profound thought from Michael Walsh, American Greatness, 10/08/18
Much of its popularity depends on today’s socialists not actually knowing what socialism is.
John Phelan, Center of the American Experiment, 10/08/18
Men too often take upon themselves in the prosecution of their revenge to set the example of doing away with those general laws to which all alike can look for salvation in adversity, instead of allowing them to subsist against the day of danger when their aid may be required
Thucydides
“Unfortunately, common sense is just not common. We have to regulate every aspect of people’s lives.”
Santa Barbara council member Jesse Dominguez provides the blueprint that we all suspected existed.
I was reading a sign high on the wall behind the bar: ONLY GENUINE PRE-WAR AMERICAN AND BRITISH WHISKEYS SERVED HERE. I was trying to count how many lies could be found in those nine words, and had reached four, with promise of more.
Dashiell Hammett
No one loves socialism quite like a moron who has never experienced it firsthand. No one hates it like someone who has seen it up close
Kurt Schlichter, Townhall.com, 30/07/18
Spiritual transcendence is the timeless water of life; technology is simply the delivery pump. We confused the two. That water can be delivered ever more rapidly does not mean it ever changes its essence. High tech has become the great delusion.
Victor Davis Hanson, NRO, 31/07/18
The combined inflation-adjusted cost of the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the Korean War, the New Deal, the invasion of Iraq, the Vietnam War, and the entire NASA space program, including the moon race, is still $686 billion less than the $3.9 trillion of bank bailouts doled out since the financial crisis of the last decade
Jim Biano, in Tim Price’s Investing Through the Looking Glass, 2016
It’s not that liberalism in any form—left, libertarian, or neoconservative—does not have useful things to say or lessons to impart. But liberalism never knows when to quit. The left liberal expands government and attacks traditional social institutions to the point of undermining liberalism’s own pre-liberal foundations in common citizenship and Western values
Daniel McCarthy, Spectator USA, 23/07/18
What more concrete action do Trump haters want: air strikes on Moscow?
Victor Davis Hanson, NRO, 24/07/18
I’ve begun to wonder whether social media was almost entirely a mistake. I can’t find any level of using it low enough that it doesn’t corrupt the experience of my own life.
Michael Brendan Dougherty, NRO, 20/07/18
I do not think Putin is a character like Hitler, he comes out of Dostoevsky
Henry Kissinger, FT, 21/07/18
“One thing is sure. If you stand still and think that the fire is still far from your borders, then your lands will become the stage upon which the tragedy is performed”
Frederick William, The Great Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia, Political Testament, 19/05/1667
You may drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she still will hurry back
Horace, Epistles, Book 1
“Well, we all make mistakes”
Maudlin pickled traitor Guy Burgess, on his Moscow death bed, 1963
Wordly men talk of ‘simple people’ as they do of ‘humble people’, with the same indulgent smile. But they should speak of them as kings
Georges Bernanos
“I am a socialist”
Adolf Hitler
The most poetical thing in the world is not being sick
GK Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, 1908
Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset.
St Francis de Sales
