Quotations

In twenty to thirty years, Islam could become the dominant religion [in Germany].
Cardinal Gerhard Müller in an interview with Diane Montagna dated September 17, 2025, quoted by Rod Dreher yesterday in his newsletter

If you’re carrying the weight of roads not taken, of dreams deferred, of a life that feels smaller than you once hoped — watch It’s a Wonderful Life again tonight. Not as nostalgia, but as revelation.

Tony Seruga also quoted by Rod Dreher 

Giorgia Meloni warns her staff that 2026 will be "much worse" than 2025

I missed this. 

Giorgia Meloni said on December 23rd, "The year we've had has been tough for all of us. But don't worry, the next one will be much worse."

This was in the Christmas message that the Italian Prime Minister delivers each year to people in her office, usually consisting of bromides. 

Last year, for example, she wished everyone a Merry Christmas especially people who 'can’t be with their families' such as police, doctors, nurses and servicemen and women. 

Zionism began in Romania

"I would claim that the Zionist movement was founded on December 30, 1881 (according to the Julian calendar), in Focşani, in Romania, at the actual “first Zionist congress”, which was attended by 51 delegates from 32 settlement organizations who met in the town’s Jewish school. The conference lasted two days, during which five members were elected to serve as the “Central Committee for the Settlement of the Land of Israel and Syria”. Samuel Pineles, a Zionist activist from Romania, was elected committee chair and secretary."

More here.

Trotsky and Hitler went to Café Central in Vienna at the same period. Did Stalin and Freud too?

[I came across this on Reddit. Tom Stoppard wrote a play called Travesties that I always meant to read about Lenin meeting James Joyce in Zurich in 1917. There's a play or novel here too.]

<In 1913, Hitler live in a Men's Dormitory in Meldemannstrasse 27 in Vienna's twentieth district. Being rejected from the art academy, he lived off the sale of his paintings and was unable to afford another residence, so he live in a men's dormitory, an institution set up for people without fixed residence, where for a weekly rent of 2,5 Kronen, you could rent a bed.

In the same year Trotsky lived at Rodlergasse 25 in Vienna's 19th district. He worked as a journalist from Vienna reporting on the Balkan wars and publishing the Vienna edition of Pravda. Trotsky had live in Vienna before after being exiled for political agitation in 1902. After the attempted Revolution of 1905 had been crushed, Trotsky again fled Russia and moved to Vienna where he had good contacts with the local Social Democratic Party and through them found employment as a journalist. Trotsky's favorite hang-out was Vienna's Cafe Central where he was relatively well known. There is an unsubstantiated anecdote that in 1917 when the Russian Revolution broke out, a fellow patron of the Central and and officer of the Austrian Army is to have said "And who is supposed to lead this revolution? Mr. Trotsky from Cafe Central?"

Quotations

“In CIA, we didn't give a hoot about democracy... If a country didn't co-operate with us, democracy didn't mean a thing, and I don't think it means a thing today.” 

CIA whistle-blower Philip Agee



"Allow your judgments their own quiet, undisturbed development, which, as with all progress, must come from deep within and can in no way be forced or hastened. All things consist of carrying to term and then giving birth. To allow the completion of every impression, every germ of a feeling deep within, in darkness, beyond words, in the realm of instinct unattainable by logic, to await humbly and patiently the hour of descent of a new clarity: that alone is to live one's art, in the realm of understanding as in that of creativity.
In this there is no measuring with time. A year doesn't matter; ten years are nothing. To be an artist means not to compute or count; it means to ripen as the tree, which does not force its sap, but stands unshaken in the storms of spring with no fear that summer might not follow. It will come regardless. But it comes only to those who live as though eternity stretches before them, carefree, silent, and endless. I learn it daily, learn it with many pains, for which I am grateful: Patience is all!"
Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke, in a letter written to aspiring poet Franz Xaver Kappus, April 23, 1903. Collected in the volume "Letters to a Young Poet" (1929).

Mark Twain, letter to Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, January 1863

“New Year's Day--Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever. We shall also reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time. However, go in, community. New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.”