The Patriot Post® · Wednesday Short Cuts

Insight: “What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. … What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves.” —Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)

For the record: “President Trump thrives on controversy, so he intentionally provokes it. No one can look at his conduct, his word choice, his Twitter feed, and come to any other conclusion than Trump stokes the fire because he loves the fight.” —Peter Heck

Narcissist-in-chief: “By the way, American energy production — you wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was president. And that whole, ‘Suddenly, America’s, like, the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas…’ That was me, people. … Just say ‘thank you,’ please.” —Barack Obama (“The boom in production almost exclusively took place on state and private lands where the Obama administration had little to no control.” —The Daily Caller’s Michael Bastasch)

Of course — you’re a Democrat: “Not only did I not get indicted, nobody in my administration got indicted, which, by the way, was the only administration in modern history that can be said about. In fact nobody came close to being indicted. Partly because the people who joined us were there for the right reasons.” —Barack Obama

Braying Jackass: “By the time I take office, what you increasingly have is a media environment in which, if you are a Fox News viewer, you have an entirely different reality than if you are a New York Times reader.” —Barack Obama

Alpha Jackass: “F—k bipartisanship. Republicans are bad. They have bad morals and bad ideas. The goal should be to eliminate them utterly as a political movement and then allow a center-right party to move into the vacuum which has basic skills like arithmetic and not being racist.” —Think Progress’s Ian Millhiser

And last… “The genius of capitalism is it’s the only system that doesn’t rely on anyone’s benevolence — which if you’ve ever dealt with people, you realize we’re only capable of that in sporadic bursts.” —Frank Fleming