A Quote by Victor Davis Hanson
Western elites - the beneficiaries of 60 years of peace and prosperity achieved by the sacrifices to defeat fascism and Communism - are unhappy in their late middle age, and show little gratitude for, or any idea about, what gave them such latitude. If they cannot find perfection in history, they see no good at all.
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But in the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining standards of health, even want of the most basic kind - too little food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is the victor.
The angry men know that this golden age (of fossil fuels) has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.
If you think about what folks have been doing for 20 or 30 years, they have been bottling frustration and resentment that the political elites don't understand them, that the political elites don't care about them, that the political elites judge them in various ways. All Donald Trump does is provide the opposite of those things.
For 60 years you gave chance to Shasaks, now I request you to give a Sevak 60 months. I say give me 60 months and we will give you a life of peace and happiness.
We believe that almost all really good investment records will involve relatively little diversification. The basic idea that it was hard to find good investments and that you wanted to be in good investments, and therefore, you'd just find a few of them that you knew a lot about and concentrate on those seemed to me such an obviously good idea. And indeed, it's proven to be an obviously good idea. Yet 98% of the investing world doesn't follow it. That's been good for us.
Elites are inevitable in politics. That is how politics is going to work. The question is, are your elites responsible, public-spirited? Do they think about the interests of others, not just themselves? And the story of Western politics since the beginning of the century is that as elites become more separated, more selfish, as they leave behind their populations and don't think about them, they become discredited. And the people look for alternatives. But the alternative is worse. Those rules of the game protect us all. And they are more precious than almost any political outcome.
It is important that we honor and remember the sacrifices of countless families in the mobilization to defeat fascism during World War II.
Today age segregation has passed all sane limits. Not only are fifteen-year-olds isolated from seventy-year-olds but social groups divide those in high school from those in junior high, and those who are twenty from those who are twenty-five. There are middle-middle-age groups, late-middle-age groups, and old-age groups - as though people with five years between them could not possibly have anything in common.
Little islands of human happiness, peace, and prosperity are so exceptional at this point in history that I'm not even sure we can draw lessons from them.
It is the basic principle of Marxism that any attempt to reconcile capital and labor so that they both co-operate in peace and prosperity is a betrayal of communism.
For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.
What, actually, is the difference between communism and fascism? Both are forms of statism, authoritarianism. The only difference between Stalin's communism and Mussolini's fascism is an insignificant detail in organizational structure.
Many ideas have struggled over the centuries to dominate the planet. Fascism. Communism. Democracy. Religion. But only one has achieved total supremacy. Its compulsive attractions rob its followers of reason and good sense. It has created unsustainable inequalities and threatened to tear apart the very fabric of society. More powerful than any religion, it has reached into every corner of the globe. It is consumerism
The "18/40/60" rule to happiness:
At age 18, people care very much about what others think of them.
By age 40, they learn not to worry what others think.
By age 60, they figure out that no one was thinking about them in the first place.
The truth is that the history of the last couple of thousand years has been broadly repeated attempts by various people or institutions - in a Freudian way - to rediscover the lost childhood of Europe, this golden age of peace and prosperity under the Romans, by trying to unify it.
The lessons of history show - and I'm not talking about any particular history, all history - when you see minor abuses start to build up in the intolerance space and do nothing about them, then they lead to bigger and bigger abuses.
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