“We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God’s world. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God’s children. And that we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.”
Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech, in Memphis, Tenn., April 3, 1968 [the day before he was assassinated] quoted by Jamil Jivani in National Post January 17, 2023
In my latest Epoch Times column I say efforts by House Republicans to replace their Speaker in the United States aren’t pretty, but at least there are principles involved… unlike what happened in Canada.
“I call these men [the Framers of the Constitution] heroes in deliberate defiance of the ban placed upon this word by most serious-minded historians. By hero I mean a leader of men who engages with clear eye and stout heart in an uncertain enterprise for some purpose larger than the gratification of his own ambition or the rewarding of his own friends, and whose deeds work a benevolent influence on the lives of countless other men.”
Clinton Rossiter The Grand Convention (and it was written in 1966 so this morale-destroying ban has been in place for a long time).
“‘His imperfections flowed from the contagion of the times: his virtues were his own.’“
Edward Gibbon on Belisarius, cited in George F. Kennan American Diplomacy 1900-1950
“The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”
“Thomas Jefferson (Summary View of the Rights of British America, August 1774)” quoted as The Federalist Patriot “Founder’s Quote Daily” for July 8, 2005 from Federalist.com
“The point is, however, that the West [in the Cold War] got the ‘big thing’ right and the lesser matters right enough. Many of history’s losers, not excluding Nazi Germany and the USSR, failed to get the really big things right although they did perform some ill chosen missions extremely well. If one had to choose, it would be preferable to pursue the correct policy inelegantly than the incorrect policy elegantly.”
Colin S. Gray Canadians in a Dangerous World
“Doughnut-Americans”
Another of mine, from June 30, 2001, on the intersectionality of obesity and what was then “political correctness” and is now “woke”.
In my latest Epoch Times column I argue that political party conventions are more interesting, and more useful to voters and parties alike, if they are not tightly scripted.