[b]Barbara W. Tuchman
An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is deep and moves on to self-doubt and self-disgust.[/b]
And now the election of Don Trump.
Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
Or me, myself and I as we call it today.
One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.
Today, at the very least, we can triple it.
…the seven “liberal arts”: Grammar, the foundation of science; Logic, which differentiates the true from the false; Rhetoric, the source of law; Arithmetic, the foundation of order because “without numbers there is nothing”; Geometry, the science of measurement; Astronomy, the most noble of the sciences because it is connected with Divinity and Theology; and lastly Music.
She means firstly music of course. You know, if we lived in a perfect world.
No one is so sure of his premises as the man who knows too little.
Here we call them Kids.
The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five to tenfold.
Of course that was before the advent of fake news. At Fox, the multiples are now off the chart. And, okay, maybe at MSNBC too.