Yesterday’s distant dream, today’s brilliant innovation, tomorrow’s basic human right.
Remembering
The obscurest epoch is today.
—Stevenson
It is simple to cheat an honest man; and one of the great themes of modern history is honest men getting cheated.
Discursive prose was a brief and happy interlude in human history: at the beginning were drums and chants, and so it shall be at the end.
History, for the progressive, is a bottomless source of self-regard. He reads of past men and past deeds, and thinks, “If only they were more like us!”
Not so very long ago, no adult in history had ever spoken of himself as the parent of an animal.
Ours is the Great Age of Hoaxes, its small compensation for being the Great Age of Fakes.
Flash mobs appeared from nowhere, a few years ago, and vanished as suddenly as they came.
There are no murders of great civilizations — only suicides.
The savage’s hatred of the civilized man does little harm, unless abetted by the civilized man’s hatred of himself.
The conservative stands athwart history with a radar gun, handing out the occasional speeding ticket to make quota.