Le 21 août 1849, un congrès de la paix se réunit a Paris. Vicor Hugo en était le président et il y fit un discours où le grand poète se montre aussi un grand prophète. En voici la partie la plus célèbre: Un jour viendra où les armes vous tomberont des mains, à vous aussi [...]
Archive for the ‘Quotations’ category
Victor Hugo, le 21 août 1849
May 21, 2009The United States and Russia, is it over between them?
May 21, 2009[from everything2.com] Alexis de Tocqueville only spent one year in the United States before he wrote “Democracy in America” (1835), which is still one of the best books about that country. The last page of the first volume describes the future evolution of the Russians and the Americans. The English translation is mine, so don’t [...]
More government and more individual initiative may work best together
May 16, 2009We want less government. We want to lead our own lives with as little as possible government interference. At least until we become aware of social, environmental, and other problems, such as in this particular example the polluted Hudson River. The polluted Hudson is only one such problem. There are myriad others that regularly place [...]
“largesses” or bailouts from the public treasury
May 15, 2009A Scottish economist, Alexander Fraser Tyler, professed this opinion already in 1776: “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesses from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising them the most [...]
George Will, Potemkin Country
April 19, 2009Washington Post, Sunday, April 19, 2009 WASHINGTON — America’s “progressive” president has some peculiarly retro policies. Domestically, his reactionary liberalism is exemplified by his policy of No Auto Company Left Behind, with its intimated hope that depopulated Detroit, where cattle could graze, can somehow return to something like the 1950s. Abroad, he seems to yearn [...]
From Lewis H. Lapham in Harper’s Magazine, May, 2009
April 19, 2009Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say; Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day; The second best’s a gay good night and quickly turn away. —W. B. Yeats Jean Baudrillard, writing in his last book, Cool Memories V, after having been diagnosed with [...]
The Pirates Challenge Obama’s Pre-9/11 Mentality, Distinctions between lawful and unlawful combatants go back to Roman times.
April 11, 2009The excerpt below is taken from an op ed piece in the WSJ of April 11, 2009, by Mackubin Thomas Owens. As the eminent military historian Sir Michael Howard argued shortly after 9/11, the status of al Qaeda terrorists is to be found in a distinction first made by the Romans and subsequently incorporated into [...]
“Al Gore’s just an opportunist.” Freeman Dyson
March 25, 2009Although I don’t know enough to say that he is right I’d like to agree with Freeman Dyson when he says, as he does in this week’s NYTimes Magazine, that “… it all boils down to ‘a deeper disagreement about values’ between those who think ‘nature knows best’ and that ‘any gross human disruption of [...]
Thornton Wilder’s “New Hampshire Boys”
March 8, 2009Today in the New York times Frank Rich tells us that it’s impossible not to be moved by that Act III passage in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town where the Stage Manager comes upon the graves of Civil War veterans in the town cemetery and says: “New Hampshire boys had a notion that the Union ought [...]
Horace Mann’s vision “a fading dream.”
February 26, 2009Although it was difficult at times, Horace Mann succeeded in persuading a majority of his contemporaries that free schools with trained teachers could inculcate desirable social values and simultaneously provide a practical education leading to prosperous and constructive citizenship. Today’s educators are limited to a hope that their proposals might bring about a slight improvement [...]
