‘Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.’
Milton Friedman
Normally a fluent and facile if easily forgettable speaker, Obama was an obnoxious, pompous, scold and myth-maker.
Conrad M Black says the unsayable, American Greatness, 24/08/20
The most common symptom of Covid-19 is that you feel just fine
Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday, 02/08/20
Community organizers are people who start clubs to give themselves something to be in charge of
Kevin D Williamson, NRO, 20/07/20
‘They issue stern ultimata to the public on almost a monthly basis, and sometimes no other basis.’
George Stigler, economist, on those folk who style themselves as intellectuals
“Everything is what it is, and not another thing.”
Joseph, Bishop Butler, Sermons, 1726
These are dark times. More important, these are stupid times
The Editors, National Review Online, 09/07/20
Among them there are plenty of people disguised as judges seeking revenge. They always have the word “Justice” in their mouths, like poisonous saliva, with their mouths always pursed, constantly ready to spit at anything which does not look discontented and goes on its way in good spirits.
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Scotland’s tinpot despot, Nicola Sturgeon…”
Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday, 05/07/20
Rather than aiming for a better future, woke militants seek a cathartic present. Cleansing themselves and others of sin is their goal. Amidst vast inequalities of power and wealth, the woke generation bask in the eternal sunshine of their spotless virtue.
John Gray, UnHerd, 17/06/20
To circumvent or undermine a valid election denies the legitimacy and sovereignty of popular rule. What appears to have been done to Mr. Flynn and the incoming Trump administration at the hands of the intelligence agencies of the Obama administration may seem merely another partisan squabble but is ultimately a rejection of republican government.
Matthew Spalding, Real Clear Policy, 26/06/20
“liberals don’t care what you do, so long as it’s mandatory.”
M Stanton Evans
…Germany is the most dark, tricky one, they [Germany] also have a great strategic discipline, they’re so identified with an authoritarian state, in their blood they have this, they love China so much, you can see all those [German] politicians, they go to China more than they go to see their grandma. Germany is leading the whole Europe, they’re so ambitious, they want to be leader but morally they are so collapsed
Ai Weiwei not pulling his punches, La Repubblica, 01/06/20
It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.
Matt Tabibi (a smart leftie), Rolling Stone, 12/06/20
“A great many things keep happening, some good, some bad.”
― Gregory of Tours, Historia Francorum, c590AD
Despite what the lockdown fanatics might think, man cannot live by Morrison’s microwave meals and dog-walking alone. We need connection, engagement, touch, art, religion. It is testament to the nanny state’s successful reduction of human beings to units of health that so many in officialdom think it is acceptable to deprive us of social, spiritual and sexual interaction for so long.
Brendan O’Neill, Spiked!, 25/05/20
“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
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
For the common run of mankind, I suspect, the highest earthly pleasure is self-righteous moral infatuation
Roger Kimball, Imprimis, February 2019
Homer has more to teach us about governance than Harvard, and always will.
Michael Walsh, American Spectator, 19/06/18
Coltrane’s quartet is the Moby-Dick of American popular music
Dominic Green, The Weekly Standard, 26/08/18
“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
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
“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
