Nearly 25 years after Iran fell to the rule of the mullahs, Victor Davis Hanson, writing in The Wages of Appeasement -- How Jimmy Carter and academic multiculturalists helped bring us Sept. 11 at OpinionJournal.com, draws upon ancient history to give us a warning:

As long ago as the fourth century B.C., Demosthenes warned how complacency and self-delusion among an affluent and free Athenian people allowed a Macedonian thug like Philip II to end some four centuries of Greek liberty--and in a mere 20 years of creeping aggrandizement down the Greek peninsula. Thereafter, these historical lessons should have been clear to citizens of any liberal society: We must neither presume that comfort and security are our birthrights and are guaranteed without constant sacrifice and vigilance, nor expect that peoples outside the purview of bourgeois liberalism share our commitment to reason, tolerance and enlightened self-interest.

Posted by Russ at 01:12 AM, May 10, 2004 in Quotes