Quote of the Day (Adlai Stevenson, on a Wise Man and History)

“A wise man does not try to hurry history. Many wars have been avoided by patience, and many have been precipitated by reckless haste.”—Adlai Stevenson, Speeches of Adlai Stevenson (1952)

Both Stevenson and the man who defeated him twice for the Presidency, Dwight Eisenhower, were sober statesmen who, whatever their failings, exhibited caution near the start of the perilous Cold War. 

The same cannot be said for the current occupant of the Oval Office, who, over the past year, has escalated an already fraught situation with North Korea into one more reminiscent of schoolyard taunting and sessions on a psychiatrist’s couch.

This President knows neither patience nor history. His office and his country have already suffered for this knowledge and character deficit. The question now is whether the world will.