The Armchair View: Forget Vietnam comparisons

Friday, August 26, 2005

Interesting, but ultimately unconvincing, essay by Timothy Garton Ash, which compares present-day America to the British Empire during the Boer War in 1905. Reihan Salam at The American Scene has some prescient comments on it.

Favourite Quotes

"To my mind, this is irregular. It is un-English; it is un-American; it is French." Mark Twain: Concerning The Jews, Harper's Magazine, March 1898
"This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put." Winston Churchill: Pencilled in the margin of a minute issued by a civil servant who was objecting to the ending of a sentence with a preposition and the use of a dangling participle in official documents.
"To those waiting with bated breath for that favourite media catchphrase, the U-turn, I have only one thing to say: You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning!" Margaret Thatcher: Conservative Party conference speech, Brighton, 10 October 1980
"Who was that lad they used to try to make me read at Oxford? Ship- Shop- Schopenhauer. That’s the name. A grouch of the most pronounced description." P. G. Wodehouse: Carry On, Jeeves – Clustering Round Young Bingo
"[Le] prix Nobel Dario Fo [écrit] (Corriere Della Sera, 15 Septembre 2001): 'Que sont les vingt mille morts de New York (sic) à côté des millions de victimes qui font chaque année les grands speculateurs?' L'attribution du prix Nobel de littérature à une nullité littéraire comme Dario Fo avait fait douter de la competence en la matière de l’Academie de Stockholm. L'equivoque est enfin dissipée: elle voulait en realité lui décerner le prix d'economie." Jean-François Revel: L'obsession anti-américaine (translation)
"Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city." George Burns
"Never give in - never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy." Winston Churchill: Harrow School speech, 29 October 1941
"The profits of 'protection' go altogether to a few score select persons—who, by favors of Congress, State legislatures, the banks, and other special advantages, are forming a vulgar aristocracy, full as bad as anything in the British or European castes, of blood, or the dynasties there of the past." Walt Whitman: Prose Works, III. Notes Left Over - 11. Who Gets the Plunder?
"Amerika, du hast es besser/Als unser Kontinent, das alte,/Hast keine verfallene Schlösser/Und keine Basalte." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Zahme Xenien IX – Den Vereinigten Staaten (translation)
"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." Winston Churchill: House of Commons speech on August 20, 1940. (at the peak of the Battle of Britain, referring to the RAF airmen)
"[A cynic] knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." Oscar Wilde: Lady Windermere's Fan
"[Günter Grass] sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe." Tom Wolfe: Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine - The Intelligent Coed's Guide to America
"And who knows? Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the President's spouse – and I wish him well." Barbara Bush: Wellesley College commencement address, 1 June 1990
"We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields, and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender!" Winston Churchill: House of Commons speech, June 4 1940 (referring to Dunkirk)
"Earnestly hope we shall not have another war with meat-coupons and no sugar and people being killed – ridiculous and unnecessary. Wonder whether Mussolini's mother spanked him too much or too little - you never know, these psychological days." Dorothy Sayers: Busman's Honeymoon - Diaries of the Dowager Duchess of Denver
"The gunfire around us makes it hard to hear. But the human voice is different from other sounds. It can be heard over noises that bury everything else. Even when it's not shouting. Even when it's just a whisper. Even the lowest whisper can be heard over armies – when it's telling the truth." Sydney Pollack et al.: The Interpreter [2005] (Dedication from the memoirs of Edmond Zuwanie)
"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile – hoping it will eat him last." Winston Churchill

The Armchair View

Friday, August 26, 2005

Forget Vietnam comparisons

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