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
The Remainer elites rely on a fantasy version of recent history, which says they lost the EU referendum not because they lost the argument, but because of a wave of racism and xenophobia sweeping UK society
Mick Hume, Spiked, 28/06/18
…the ultimate achievement of reason is to recognise that there are an infinity of things which surpass it. It is indeed feeble if it can’t get as far as understanding that.
Pascal
I am very definitely not a critic of reason. Quite the opposite. I am a critic of what has in our time come to take the place of reason, a mindless rationality which neglects judgment and experience
Iain McGilchrist, 2013
There’s always an excuse for why progressives lost power, and there’s always a plan to regain that power by “fixing” perfectly fine institutions.
Charles CW Cooke, NRO, 02/07/18
In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle notes that good education means having been trained from childhood to like and dislike the proper things. More and more, alas, our country has reneged on that fundamental responsibility
Roger Kimball, American Greatness, 01/07/18 (applies to nearly everywhere)
Americans, Chinese, and Russians know how to use their power. Europeans only wish for things.
French philosopher Pierre Manent
Like black neighborhoods on the day after Election Day, the Kremlin fantasy is no longer useful to the Democrats
Jason Morgan, American Thinker, 23/06/18
Homer has more to teach us about governance than Harvard, and always will.
Michael Walsh, American Spectator, 19/06/18
From my recent European trips across Switzerland, France, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Italy, one thing is clear: people on both the ‘left’ and ‘right’ feel that they have been the punchline of a long-running joke by the Party of Davos.
Steve Bannon, The Spectator, 09/06/18
Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across
Sun Tzu
In Canada, meanwhile, the Foreign Minister (gulp) Chrystia Freeland had no sooner compared Trump to Hitler than her own grandfather was outed as a Nazi collaborator
Mark Steyn, Steyn Online, 11/06/18
Commentators, largely 20-somethings whose courtroom experience seems to be repeated viewings of Legally Blonde, kept insisting that the ruling was narrow. It wasn’t
Kurt Schlichter, Townhall.com, 07/06/8, on the Cakeshop ruling
Today youth is the categorical imperative of all the generations. … People in their forties are teenagers who have not grown up. … It is no longer the case that adolescents take refuge in their collective identity, in order to get away from the world; rather it is an infatuated world which pursues adolescence. … The long process of the conversion to hedonism and consumerism of Western societies has culminated today in the worship of juvenile values. The bourgeois is dead, long live the adolescent.
Alain Finkielkraut, The Undoing of Thought, 1998
Such arguments do not resonate with a younger generation that has been brought up to believe they can do whatever seems right in their own eyes, effectively becoming little deities, even in matters as profound as life and death.
Cal Thomas, Townhall.com, 31/05/18, on the bigger picture behind the Irish abortion referendum
They create some sort of moral test, usually out of thin air, and then announce you have failed it
Kurt Schlichter on Townhall.com, 31/05/18, explaining the (worldwide) ‘liberal playbook rules’
The posturing, pipsqueak Irish Prime Minister was close to tears. Supporters of the legalisation campaign were ecstatic, cheering and hugging, waving their banners. It was more like VE Day than the announcement of a decision on such a sombre subject as terminating pregnancy. Wherever you stand in the debate, there’s no dispute that abortion involves ending a human life, even in embryo, and deserves to be treated with the utmost dignity. But this was politics for the Twittersnapgram generation. Everybody had to be in the movie. Look at me, me, me!
Richard Littlejohn, Daily Mail, 29/05/18
There are politicians like Juncker all over the West. They seem sincerely to believe the average voter is only one good lecture away from changing his mind about everything. But they are wrong. Italy has hit the wall. Populists are taking power there not because the public has heard too little talk, but because it has heard too much.
Christopher Caldwell, The Weekly Standard, 25/08/18
It just took a few key words to brainwash people: “Magdalene Laundries”, “Savita”, “Tuam”. None of these was really very relevant. Unlike “blood”, “slaughter”, “murder”, “dismemberment”, “pain”, which would seem to be more linked to the abortion debate.
Bruvver Eccles, over at ecclesandbosco.blogspot.co.uk, 25/08/18
Stalin never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, conceit or self-adulation
Stalin, Short Biography of Stalin, 1947
It is the essence of geopolitics to be able to distinguish between different degrees of evil
Paul Johnson, Modern Times, 1983
To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved into Michelangelo’s David
Tom Wolfe
“We have reached a point in this particular technology where there is no possibility of denial of an act of destruction by the operator. It is before one’s eyes. The sensations of dismemberment flow through the forceps like an electric current.”
Abortion doctor, Warren Hern, being honest in 1978
Giving veto power to the heckler has never worked anywhere
Michael Goodwin, New York Post, 12/05/18
I haven’t seen the Democrats this upset since Lincoln freed the slaves
Rush Limbaugh
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone
Blaise Pascal
Besides the grotesque politicisation of entire disciplines, it is absurd that students should be racking up enormous debts for the privilege of listening to mediocre academics from the back of a lecture theatre
Peter Franklin on the state of much of higher education, Unherd, 09/05/18
The urge to pass new laws must be seen as an illness, not much different from the urge to bite old women
Auberon Waugh
The sinner is at the very heart of Christianity. Nobody is so competent as the sinner in matters of Christianity. Nobody, except the saint.
Charles Peguy
There are many who would wish to be esteemed humble, but are unwilling to suffer any humiliation
St Alphonsus Liguori
Barack Obama was…a lightweight, a career opportunist whose carefully managed resume touched all the right buttons but was so thin it could have been written on rice paper. Despite having written two books about himself by the age of 45, he hadn’t actually done much.
Hmm, kind of accurate from Chuck Hustmyre, American Thinker, 06/02/18
There is never enough time or space to mock the United Nations adequately.
Jed Babbin, American Spectator, 26/12/17
Never will we understand the value of time better than when our last hour is at hand
St Arnold Janssen
Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk
Henry David Thoreau
“Silence is the outer wall that we must build in order to protect an interior edifice.”
Cardinal Robert Sarah
“Whoever overcomes by force, hath overcome but half his foe.”’
Satan, in Milton’s Paradise Lost
“Do not ask where a hero comes from”
Chinese proverb, courtesy of Sir David Tang, FT, 27/05/17
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese
GK Chesterton
He was a bold man who first ate an oyster
Jonathan Swift
“it will bring down a curse upon us worse than that which God called down on the builders of Babel; rather than our speaking different languages, not to be speaking a genuine language at all.”
The late Sir Michael Dummett, Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, referring to the plague of moral relativism
Succisa virescit – pruned, it grows again.
A Benedictine motto
I trust that my faith, my age and my life’s work give me perspective and credibility when I say I believe IS to be more evil than the Nazis who drove my family from Vienna.
Lord Weidenfeld
“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
