Lord Black: one of a kind scrapper

Any of you wanting a good daily read, both interesting and funny, check out Mark Steyn’s coverage of Conrad Black’s trial, here.

For the sake of notable quotes, here’s why I hope Lord Black comes out victorious; overcoming his accusers so he can keep making public statements like this:

[Trudeau's] incitement of ethnic, occupational, regional, and sexual groups debased public policy and ultimately almost bankrupted the country. He, more than anyone, turned Canada into a people of whining politically conformist welfare addicts.
–Conrad Black, A Life in Progress (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1993), p.113.

Pierre Trudeau’s book Memoirs is a monument to human vanity that refreshes the reader’s memory about all Trudeau’s tendencies to glibness, faddishness, pretension, and the affected posturing of the inherited-money limousine liberal…
–Conrad Black, The Financial Post, February 26, 1994.

“I do not at all have the mind of a bully… in my mind bullies are intolerant of contrary opinion, domineering and rather cowardly. I would hope that none of those terms could be fairly used in describing me.”

On Canada’s U.N. ambassador, Stephen Lewis, in 1987: “His clangorous tambourine-rattling on behalf of the United Nations…”

On John Ralston Saul, author, philosopher and husband of future Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson, in 1988, responding to an unflattering Saul profile of Black in Britain’s Spectator magazine: “[Saul is]a familiar and somewhat pitiful figure who has hovered and festered for some years on the fringes of Canadian government and fiction writing. Those who would retain his services should confine him to subjects better suited…to his sniggering, puerile, defamatory and cruelly limited talents.”

On Toronto’s Upper Canada College, where he was expelled for stealing and selling exam papers, in his 1993 memoir, Conrad Black: A Life In Progress: “All those who, by their docility or obsequiousness, legitimized the excesses of the school’s penal system, the several sadists and few aggressively fondling homosexuals on the faculty, and the more numerous swaggering boobies who had obviously failed in the real world and retreated to Lilliput where they could maintain their exalted status by constant threat of battery: all gradually produced in me a profound revulsion.”

On professional managers vs. owner-managers (ibid.): “My natural sympathies are with the proprietors, whose own money is at stake. Too often I have seen non-proprietorial managers focus on keeping others at bay, expanding their companies unwisely and steadily improving their own financial condition irrespective of performance. The proprietor-manager implicitly accepts responsibility for his actions, the consequences of his mistakes, the reward for his successes.”

On Doris Phillips and “Jim” McDougald, the widows whose cooperation was key to Black’s gaining control of conglomerate Argus Corp. Ltd. (ibid.): “The whole arrangement was requested by the rapacious ladies, vetted by them, explained labouriously to them in monosyllables and with examples adapted to the mind of a child of 10, and they understood and approved every letter and every word of the agreement.”

On then-Ontario attorney-general Roy McMurtry, who conducted an inquiry into Black’s business conduct in the 1980s (ibid.): “Roy had scrambled about through our records like an asphyxiated cockroach for over a year and come up empty-handed…The police had acted like Kafkaesque, Orwellian, Koestlerian thugs. The attorney general was wholly spineless.”

On Canada (ibid.): “The destructive fixation of the envious English-Canadian mind requires that the highest, happiest most agile flyers be laid low. [It is] a sadistic desire corroded by soul-destroying envy, to intimidate all those who might aspire to anything the slightest exceptional.”

On modesty, Wall Street Journal interview, Nov. 8, 1994: “Humility is a good quality, but it can be overdone.”

On critics, parting words to a 1994 gathering of Bay Street financiers at Toronto’s National Club: “Anyone who wants to get something off their chest should do it – even if I sue you for it.”

On defending capitalism, interview with journalist Richard Siklos in his 1995 Black biography, Shades of Black: “The conservative philosophy of capitalists, until recently, made a very poor showing in the history of ideas. Businessmen largely have been unable or unwilling to defend themselves with words; and even when they tried, they long tended to bellow ultra-right clichés like wounded dinosaurs, much to the amusement of the intellectual left.”

On Canada, a few days after his induction into the British House of Lords and new permanent residence in London, at a November 2001 speech to the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute: “[Leaving Canada has been] my gesture against the condition Irving Layton described 35 years ago as the Canadian political and intellectual communities’ tendency to regard ‘cowardice as wisdom, philistinism as Olympian serenity and the spitefulness of the weak as moral indignation. Surely we, or as I must now say, with some regret, you, can do better than this.”

On the anti-Americanism of the Canadian media (ibid): “Canada’s media should have done a more efficient job than they have of informing Canadians of [the Americans') exemplary competitive performance. Instead, Canadian media have tended to focus excessively on perceived American shortcomings."

On his use of corporate aircraft, in an Aug. 5, 2002 internal HI e-mail sent to a fellow HI officer (ibid.): "There has not been an occasion for many months when I got on our plane without wondering whether it was really affordable. But I'm not prepared to re-enact the French Revolutionary renunciation of the rights of nobility. We have to find a balance between an unfair taxation on the company and a reasonable treatment of the founders-builders-managers. We are proprietors, after all, beleaguered though we may be."

On Anglo-American relations, in his Ruttenberg Lecture for the Centre for Policy Studies, in February 2003: "In general, the prime minister [Tony Blair] has done a commendable job of facing down the lobotomous old Left in his own party, being close but not obsequious to Washington, and recreating Pitt the Younger as he has coordinated Iraq policy with the European countries tired of being browbeaten by the French and Germans.”

On his critics, after a downgrading of the credit ratings of Toronto-based Hollinger Inc., controlling shareholder of Hollinger International, in an April 2003 London Times interview: “We are not running a Christian Scientists’ meeting here where we all have to sing from the same hymn sheet. Anybody who complains about it can take a hike.”

On his prosecutorial tormentors, in a January 2004 e-mail to filmmaker Debbie Melnyk, who was completing a documentary about Black: “I am in excellent health and spirits and, given the malice, cowardice and savagery of the onslaught against me, am reasonably satisfied with recent and prospective progress. The committee has thrown down the mask and shown itself as a Stalin show trial; the courts will provide justice in the end and my enemies will not enjoy the process.”

On his fate, in an e-mail to Black documentary maker Debbie Melynk, reported in the National Post, Oct. 14, 2004: “It will startle and disappoint an entire burgeoning industry of pundits, eulogists and curio-vendors, but I’m far from dead.” Black elaborated: “When everyone is finished dancing on my grave, they may be disconcerted to find I am not in it.” Black also corrected the false impression given by a famous photograph of his appearance with Barbara Amiel Black at a British costume party: “I wasn’t Richelieu, who had a goatee, just a cardinal, because it was the last costume available at the place I went to rent one, and my wife wasn’t Marie Antoinette, only a barmaid.”

On his trans-Atlantic reputation, interviewed in George Tombs’s Lord Black: The Biography, and excerpted in the National Post, Nov. 26, 2004: “I appreciate the absurdity of the situation in which I am persecuted in the United States and reviled in Canada and Britain for being pro-American. In all three countries, the zeitgeist is hostile and there is a great hostility to executives who can be portrayed as self-indulgent, and a tendency to regard anyone in my position as a crook…”

On his reputation, reacting to a Delaware courtroom setback, in a London Times interview: “I assume the sadistic fascination with my life will eventually come to an end.”

On his reputation, May 30, 2005 Fortune interview: “I have no doubt that mothers in America use my name to frighten their children into finishing their vegetables.”

On his fate, May 30, 2005 interview in Fortune: “[I am a] victim of corporate governance terrorists.”

On his fate, in a rumoured conversation with guests at the January 2005 wedding of Donald Trump and Melania Knauss, reported in the New York Times: “Don’t write me off. I’m about to become a corporate-governance counterterrorist.”

On his fate, June 29, 2006 interview with Globe and Mail columnist Lawrence Martin: “Canadians suspect, if only intuitively, the corruption of the American prosecutorial system and I have made the transition from being perceived as a plutocrat to an underdog…I am undaunted…When the case is exposed as the unmitigated farrago of lies and defamations that it is, the exhilaration at having defeated the most powerful organization in the world – not just the so-called Justice Department, but the SEC, IRS, and their Canadian quislings as well – will be very great and I will resume my career fortified.”

On the United States (ibid.): “After what I’ve been subjected to, and what is still to come, I cannot claim much residual affection for it as a country.”

On Canada (ibid.): “My opinion of Canada has changed…Canada has become so astronomically rich that it has a colossal opportunity…accentuated by the development for the first time since before the First World War of a real two-party system. The collapse of the separatist threat in Quebec and the rise of Alberta also take the inevitability out of endless drift to the left.”

On Canada (ibid.), defending its military role in Afghanistan: “Canada is a country that I think has become accustomed to thinking of itself as a middle power and a secondary country. And yet there are 191 members of the United Nations and Canada’s undoubtedly one of the top 10 most important countries in the U.N. and it isn’t a middle power; it’s a very important country. And we have to act like that.”

On Canada (ibid.): “It has been a splendid time to be in Canada. A united Conservative party, for which I and many others have fought, has produced a federal two-party system for the first time in a hundred years in Canada. The huge economic growth of China and India has enabled Canada to keep its generous social benefits and reduce taxes to a point where the brain drain to the U.S. should now dry up…Canada has become one of the 10 or 12 most important countries of the 192 in the world. Those of us brought up to believe that Canada’s foreign policy was to tug at the trouser-leg of the Americans and British must realize that it is unnecessary and undignified to continue to do so…I have never been happier to be Canadian.”

For more quotes, try here.