Dalton Camp - Quotations

Quotations

• "Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies."
• "Little of signal importance in the global scene of things has ever been at issue, much less determined, as a result of the Canadian political process."
• "One would think that man would run out of wars to make or nations to invade or, that at some epiphanous time, nations would conspire to stop the killing, that war would become not the last resort but simply an unthinkable one. But here we find ourselves at war again, against half the world in general and no one in particular, pulverizing ruins and inflicting "collateral damage" - a euphemism for killing - on people we know nothing of, in a land we have nothing against, hope never to see, in a cause so rhetorical and clothed so much in hyperbole as to be unattainable."
• "He had been walking for exercise on a weekend in the early spring. The ice had just gone from the river, leaving it to swell upon its banks, turbulent, black, and impenetrably cold. He started across the bridge, following two boys-perhaps he went to warn them-but reaching the centre span he heard and saw them in the water. And then he jumped from the bridge to join them in death.

In the bloodless wars of politics, the wounds are to pride and place. In such activity, men easily exaggerate their relevance to it. More than that, once caught up in it, the significance of politics becomes disproportionate to their lives. To many, I suspect, their importance to themselves, as to others, lies in their being politicians. One would wish it to be the other way round-that their importance as politicians lies in men being themselves, true to their best impulse and finest ideals, less concerned with the victory of a party as they are more concerned with the survival of their own personality and nature. But party politics feeds and flourishes upon the blood of sublimation. Every man must serve another's larger cause, giving or lending himself in whole or in part to another judgement, a further condition, a greater good, a lesser will, a common motive and purpose, and these replace his own criteria, the immediacy of his own conscience, until his own moral nature becomes a mere accessory to the cause, which is no more than his neighbour's, but the product of some ill-defined greater good and lesser evil. In the trackless waste of politics, men lose their purpose, and the stars by which they once steered vanish in the bottomless sky of other men's aspirations. They wander like nomads, from oasis to oasis, quenching their thirst from the wells of power and warming themselves by the abandoned fires of those who have come and gone before." - Gentlemen, Players and Politicians.