Sense and Non-Sense

“When there's no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon's only tool.” Paul Kalanithi,
When Breath Becomes Air.

“Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions.” George W. Bush, Dallas Memorial, 7/12/16

“To read in the service of any ideology is not, in my judgment, to read at all.” Harold Bloom

"This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility." Barak Obama to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, March 26, 2012

“I did think I saw heaven open, and saw the very face of God.” George Frideric Handel on finishing "Hallelujah Chorus."

“Our Heavenly Father, bless this meal and all those who are about to receive it. Make us thankful for Your generous bounty, and Your unceasing love. Please remind us, in these hard times, to be grateful for what we have been given, and not to ask for what we can not have. And make us mindful of those less fortunate among us, as we sit at this table with all of Thy bounty. Amen.” Royce Spalding in Places in the Heart.

“WITH little fanfare, a dangerous notion has taken hold in progressive policy circles: that the amount of money borrowed by the federal government from Americans to finance its mammoth deficits doesn’t matter. Debt doesn’t matter? Really? That’s the most irresponsible fiscal notion since the tax-cutting mania brought on by the advent of supply-side economics. And it’s particularly problematic right now, as Congress resumes debating whether to extend the payroll-tax reduction or enact other stimulative measures.– “The dangerous notion that debt doesn’t matter,” New York Times, Jan. 20, 2012

“Because progressivism exists to justify a few people bossing around most people and because progressives believe that only government’s energy should flow unimpeded, they crave energy scarcities as an excuse for rationing — by them — that produces ever-more-minute government supervision of Americans’ behavior.”  George Will 2012

“Civilization has always depended upon two great pillars – the first being the willingness of young women to bear children and the second being the willingness of men to transfer their resources to women and children. The first great pillar has already collapsed to the extent that Western women no longer replace the native populations, and now the second great pillar is showing tremendous cracks.”  Vox Day. An Important Year, 1/1/2012

"You have two choices. Either you can work your way out of this [debt crisis], or you wait until it collapses and you have to rebuild it." Ron Paul, December 3, 2011.

“In 2000, it would have been possible to cut government spending by 15 percent, and that would have sufficed to keep it in line with tax receipts. In 2007, it would have been possible to cut it by 25 percent, and that would have been enough to prevent the debt spiral from getting worse. Due to vast increase in spending that led to the doubling of federal debt since 2008, it is now necessary to cut federal spending in half simply to keep the situation from getting worse.”  Vox Day, Choosing Collapse, Dec. 3, 2011.

“[Racism is a] complex system of beliefs and behaviors, grounded in a presumed superiority of the white race.  These beliefs and behaviors are conscious and unconscious; personal and institutional, and result in the oppression of people of color and benefit the dominant group, whites. A simpler definition is racial prejudice + power = racism. “ University of Cincinnati Diversity Plan, 2011

“As a former Democrat, let me say that the Democratic Party wants the poor to remain one class, at the bottom, united and voting Democratic.  They would like that class to move up, but they want solidarity of the class….There is a fundamental divide between … upward mobility and promoting class cohesion.  I think Obama’s policies are designed to promote the latter.  Dick Morris, former Clinton advisor, 2011 12 05

"The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." John Roberts, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court.

“The lesson of Italy, and most of the rest of Europe, is never to become a high-tax, slow-growth entitlement state, because the inevitable reckoning is nasty, brutish and not short.”  Wall Street Journal, Nov. 9, 2011

“Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true.” G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy, 1908

“[Unemployment insurance] is one of the most direct ways to infuse money into the economy because people who are unemployed and obviously aren't earning a paycheck are going to spend the money that they get . . . and that creates growth and income for businesses that then lead them to making decisions about jobs—more hiring."  Jay Carney, August 11, 2011 Press Conference.  Reported by Stephen Moore, Why Americans Hate Economics, Wall Street Journal, Aug. 19, 2011

“The solution to such a double dip [recession] would have been a sufficient spending from the government. Instead, we got some stimulus and lots and lots of cuts in spending on important social programs. Even the markets understand this is bad for the living and have responded by falling precipitously around the world.” Laurie Essig, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Aug. 7, 2011.

“I object and take exception to everyone saying that Obama and Congress are spending money like a drunken sailor.  As a former drunken sailor, I quit when I ran out of money.”  Bruce L Hargraves, USN Retired

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that “the buck stops here.” Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. “ Barak Obama, Senate Floor March 20, 2006

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government.  A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.  From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse over loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship." Attributed to Alexander Tyler, 1887

“Liberals despise the rule of law because it interferes with their ability to rule by mob. … You will note that they never ask: Who did what in this case? All they want to know is which class of people [is] on trial.  Social justice is the only justice that interests the Left because it's the only justice that can be delivered by the political agitation of a mob.”  Ann Coulter,  NY Times: Fraught Nexus of Lies, Stupidity, and Bigotry.  6/22/2011

 “Affirmative action, at bottom, represents a radical redefinition of rights. It focuses not on an individual’s desire to be free from acts of aggression or fraud, but on whole classes of persons allegedly denied opportunity to realize arbitrarily determined social and economic outcomes. The latter vision holds that inter-group inequality, by its nature, is a product of injustice and thus is in need of forcible redress. This redefinition has triggered a growing State, which in turn has created an official means of stigmatizing innocent persons and institutions.”  Carl Horowitz, The Expanding Vengeance of Affirmative Action, 6/18/2011

"I'll be looking for other ways to contribute my talents so that we live up to that most New York and American of ideals. The ideal that a family, a community and, ultimately, a country is the one thing that unites us.  The one thing that we're all focused on.  With God's help and with hard work, we will all be successful."  Former Congressman Anthony Weiner

“The success of yesterday's mission is a tribute to our men and women now serving in Iraq.  The operation was based on the superb work of intelligence analysts who found the dictator's footprints in a vast country. The operation was carried out with skill and precision by a brave fighting force. Our servicemen and women and our coalition allies have faced many dangers in the hunt for members of the fallen regime, and in their effort to bring hope and freedom to the Iraqi people. Their work continues, and so do the risks. Today, on behalf of the nation, I thank the members of our Armed Forces and I congratulate them.” George W. Bush After the Capture of Saddam Hussein.

“I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network.   Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan.  And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and I authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice. Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.” Barak Obama After the Killing of Osama Bin Laden

"Sometimes it is better to be silent, and thought a fool, than to open your mouth and leave no doubt." Abraham Lincoln

“Write kindnesses in marble.  Write injuries in the sand.”  Persian Proverb

"Racial criteria are irrational, irrelevant, [and] odious to our way of life." Thurgood Marshal

“The moral code, the moral compass of the state-controlled media is something to behold. Now, some of you may not know the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner hosted a state dinner last night for Hu Jintao of China. Hu Jintao is holding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner in prison in China. Not making it up. The 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner hosted a dinner for the guy holding the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner in prison, and the media does not get the irony of this at all. They're too busy running around chasing Sarah Palin and radio talk show hosts over ‘civility.’”  Rush Limbaugh, Jan. 20. 2011

"Drunkenness is when the tongue walks on stilts and reason goes forward under half a sail." - Martin Luther (Quoted in God and Guiness, Stephen Mansfield, pg. 30)

“We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experiences and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language.” Students' Right to Their Own Language, Conference on College Composition and Communication, National Council of Teachers of English, 1974

“The student writer is the expert, commanding subjects and strategies for composing that the teacher has no access to because they are born of the writer's experience. The student has a self to discover, some truth to express, a unique language and voice.” Erika Lindermam, "Three Views of Composition," College English 57( 3), 1995, Page 287.

“And not once in 26 years of teaching composition did I hear an able instructor or writer say that he or she became so by chatting with other novices in the field.” Nan Miller, Postmodern Moonshine in English 101, Academic Questions, Summer 2006, Page 6.

At some point, no amount of dancing will help you learn more algebra.”  Christopher F. Chabris reviewing How to Wake Up Slumbering Minds by Daniel T. Willingham, Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2009

“But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.” – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, speaking at the 2010 Legislative Conference for National Association of Counties, 3/9/10

"When everything is moving at once, nothing appears to be moving, as onboard ship. When everyone is moving towards depravity, no one seems to be moving; but if someone stops, he shows up the others who are rushing on by acting as a fixed point." Blaise Pascal

“I think they are making fun of us.  It’s a pile of bricks.”  British citizen viewing modern art.  Why Beauty Matters, Roger Scruton.

"Fathom the odd hypocrisy that Obama wants every citizen to prove they are insured, but they don't have to prove they are citizens."  Ben Stein

"How do we, over the long term, get control of our deficit?" (sic) Barak Obama, Columbus, OH, Aug. 19, 2010.  Quoted by Wall Street Journal, 4.4 Billion, Aug. 23., 2010

“We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.”  Winston Churchill.

“We might have been a free and great people together.”  Thomas Jefferson quoted by Peggy Noonan, A Cold Man’s Warm Words, Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2010.

“I'm going to put in the record ... a host of quotes from our national security experts who tell us that carbon pollution leading to climate change will be over the next 20 years the leading cause of conflict, putting our troops in harm's way. And that's why we have so many returning veterans who want us to move forward and address this issue."   Barbara Boxer, US Senator, California

"Professors tend to think alike because the profession is increasingly self-selected…The university may not explicitly require conformity on more than scholarly matters, but the existing system implicitly demands and constructs it."  Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University

“Rich people need to understand how poor people live and poor people need to understand how rich people work.”  Sig Alpha, Grand Junction, CO.

“The tea partiers are protesting against exactly what the Greeks are demanding.” Slouching Towards Athens, Arthur C. Brooks, Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2010

“This Bible is for the government of the people, by the people and for the people” John Wycliffe, 1384 English Translation of the Bible, Quoted by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address.

[The social-learning approach to education is] an activist view of learning, whereby students internally construct knowledge from interpretations of their interactions with their physical and social environment… Knowledge always stands in relation to the context from it was derived and the experience of the observer who must make sense of it.” Gary D. Borich, Effective Teaching Methods: Research-Based Practice. 6^th edition, Pearson-Merrill Prentice Hall, Columbus, OH, 2007

“Effective education is based on the belief that truth is unified, that it is discoverable and that it can be transmitted between individuals, across generations and among cultures.  These principles are fundamental to the idea of a university and must guide our both our curriculum and pedagogy.  Robert Maynard Hutchins said it best. ‘Education implies teaching.  Teaching implies knowledge.  Knowledge is truth.  Truth is the same everywhere.’” University of Cincinnati College of Engineering Master Plan, M10 (Draft), April, 2009

“As the welfare state became the War on Poverty, federal money went not to the individual but to ‘services.’  From this paradigm shift arose the poverty-industrial complex. Priorities were driven by government-grant possibilities, which meant that providers were rewarded not for solving problems but for the proliferation of problems. …the solutions to the problems of our nation’s Harlems will never be found in its Harvards….One of the lessons of the 1960s is that elitism is more devastating to the interests of poor people than racism is.”  Robert L. Woodson, President Neighborhood Enterprise, Washington DC.  Centennial Review, Vol 1, December 2009.“

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friends, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."  Dr. Adrian Rogers (three-time President of the Southern Baptist Convention)

“It’s one thing to say burn baby burn as we did and have and no doubt will.  But after the burning is over the question is where are you going to live now.  That’s the question facing the universities today.  What will serve as the basis for the educational enterprise?”  Dallas Willard, Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern California.

“I think people don’t understand how much of the trouble that they see in the world really started in the universities.  What is happening to us here affects the world. “ Mary S. Poplin, Professor of Education, Claremont Graduate University.

"Leadership is stewardship, not ownership." Rick Warren, Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency.

“The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is -- second only to American political campaigns -- the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time.” Larry Laudan, Science and Relativism (1990)

"The question is no longer as Dostoevski put it: 'Can civilized men believe?' Rather: Can unbelieving men be civilized?" Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free." P.J. O'Rourke

"Access to a waiting list is not access to health care."  Canadian Supreme Court, Wall Street Journal, Aug.14, 2005

"If reproduction as such is limited and the number of births decreased, then the natural struggle for existence, which only allows the strongest and healthiest to survive, will be replaced by the obvious desire to save at any cost even the weakest and sickest; thereby a progeny is produced, which must become ever more miserable, the longer this mocking of nature and its will persists. . . . A stronger race will supplant the weaker, since the drive for life in its final form will decimate every ridiculous fetter of the so-called humaneness of individuals, in order to make place for the humaneness of nature, which destroys the weak to make place for the strong."  Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

"The philosophy that fueled German militarism and Hitlerism is taught as fact in every American public school, with no disagreement allowed." Phillip Johnson

Freedom uncoupled from truth, John Paul taught, leads to chaos and thence to new forms of tyranny. For, in the face of chaos (or fear), raw power will inexorably replace persuasion, compromise, and agreement as the coin of the political realm. The false humanism of freedom misconstrued as "I did it my way" inevitably leads to freedom's decay, and then to freedom's self-cannibalization. This [council] was not the soured warning of an antimodern scold; this was the sage counsel of a man who had given his life to freedom's cause from 1939 on.  Geroge Weigel, Mourning and Remembrance, Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2005

"Democracy in America is still a work in progress, but even with its flaws, this unique American experience provides a shining beacon to peoples who still suffer in places where ethnic difference is a license to kill."  Condoleezza Rice

“Why should the right wing be allowed to monopolize the intellectual high ground?” A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies,_Alan D. Sokal,

"We anchor the debate of changing diasporic (transnational) identities to Canada, but, meanwhile, we question space, place, and location as geopolitical manifestations, historical events and metaphorical imagined communities. The boundaries of homes are often remembered as sites of historicized struggles; in addition nuanced identities present new possibilities for articulating anti_racist, post_colonial identities or for critiquing the limits of modernity ....In this conference we seek to explore the hybridity encoded in "memory" and remembering, and its expression and representation in literature, film, music, personal narratives and life writing. We invite papers that seek to move the concept of Diasporas further, with particular reference to gender and class."       The York University Centre for Feminist Research call for papers for an October 2003 conference "Diaspora, Memory, and Silence: Who Calls Canada Home?"  Quoted in Academic Questions, Vol 16, page 35.

"The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble across a sample [that] supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it representative of a whole class." Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (1929)

"It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf."  Walter Lippman

"We must be lucid–there are in France some behaviors which cannot be tolerated. There are without any doubt forces in France which are seeking to destabilize the republic, and it is time for the republic to act." Bernard Stasi supporting France's hijab ban

"The nation that has no absolutes except its commitment to nonabsolutes will have no chance against a nation that stands for absolutes-however terrible those absolutes. The civilization with a lie at its center-the creed that all religions and cultures are equally valuable-will collapse before the civilization that insists it is superior."   Andree Sue

{Campaign Reform} laws do contain a notable exception. Newspaper owners may spend as much money as they wish publishing arguments in support of candidates with whom they “coordinate.” This solitary exemption from restrictions on free speech is, of course, no mistake: The dominant newspapers in America are liberal, and the 1974 law was passed by a Democratic Congress.  Thomas G. West, The Liberal Assault on Freedom of Speech, Imprimis, January 2004

“Our massive strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue.”  Bill Ruder, Assistant Secretary of Commerce, Kennedy Administration

"But tolerance is a different (and less profound) concept than the right to religious liberty. Tolerance may arise merely from a temporary lack of power to enforce conformity; it does not by itself invoke a natural right. The concept of religious liberty, on the other hand, depends upon a particular conception of God, a particular conception of the human person, and a particular conception of liberty."  Michael Novak, The Ten Commandments Controversy, Imprimis, December 2003

"This was the face of American prosperity at the end of the twentieth century–racially tolerant, environmentally conscious and determined to wall itself off from the low-paid countrymen who cut its grass, and wait on its tables and look after its children."  George Packer, The Blood of Liberals, 2000

"The concept of 'children's rights' implies an official orthodoxy, with public agencies determining that certain beliefs are true and others false and enforcing that distinction in the name of freedom."  James Hitchcock, The Enemies of Religious Liberty, First Things, February 2004, page 26

"'What is truth?' said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer." Francis Bacon, Essays Of Truth.

"Truth is truth to the end of reckoning." William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure.

"Man has been eating God's oats for a thousand years. It's not the place of an eight-year-old boy to change that tradition."  Reverend Maclean, in A River Runs Through It.

“Because they are underfunded, state institutions have become too weakened to incorporate the successful strategies of for-profit institutions.”   Jack B. Jewett, Trusteeship, Jan/Feb 2003, page 7

“Life, What a Beautiful Choice.”  Ad, 1994, De Moss Foundation

“Choice, What a Beautiful Life.”  Ad, 1994, NARAL, Pro-Choice America

"The right to life does not come from government; it comes from the Creator of life."  George W. Bush, 2004

"Life begins with the mother's decision."  Wesley Clark, 2004, in World Magazine

“Rhetorical man is trained not to discover reality but to manipulate it. Reality is what is accepted as reality, what is useful." Richard A. Lanham, 1976. The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.

“…the language of postmodernism is anything but a morally neutral tool that people of any persuasion might pick up and use to some anointed or appointed end. Instead, that vocabulary commits its user to a very specific vision of the self, truth, and the ethical life-a vision fundamentally at odds with the most basic affirmations of the Christian creeds…. The rhetoric of postmodern pragmatism creates a moral universe in which the self that would use language to ‘help get us what we want’ (Rorty) discovers itself brought into bondage by the very tool it sought to master.”… The language of postmodern pragmatics can imagine no goal for human striving beyond that of Rieff's ‘manipulatable sense of well-being.’ To appropriate its images is to accept its vision of life as a process with no goal beyond that of perpetuating the process itself and making it as pleasurable as possible…. What is ultimately at stake in the debate over the vocabulary of postmodernism is our vision of truth and moral order. The postmodern vocabulary, as we have seen, assumes a naturalistic view of the created order and a merely preferential basis for the ethical life…. Whatever tool you choose to use to enhance your own well-being does not matter; only your freedom in choosing does.” Roger Lundin, The Ultimately Liberal Condition, First Things 52 (April 1995): 22-27

"....we left together to escape a tyranny and end up shootin at each other in the land of the free… imagine that."   Irish Union Soldier, Gods and Generals

"Which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of any outward objects. For summer being done, all things stand upon them with a weather-beaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue."  William Bradford, Plymouth, 1620

"...the problem of the school and the university is the most critical problem  affecting Western civilization today...at the heart of the crisis in Western  civilization lies the state of the mind and the spirit of the  university...responsible Christians face two tasks---that of saving the soul and  that of saving the mind."  ---Charles Malik (former United Nations Secretary General), quoted by Vishal Mangalwadi

"the university is no longer characterized by debate. The metaphor of a "marketplace of ideas" seems more appropriate [A]rguments depend on intellectual constraints, which now seem lacking. Our post-secular situation is governed by fashion rather than argument, responding to boredom and restlessness. So our narrative leads to a student generation that thinks that its views should get as much respect as anybody’s, at least after graduation." C. John Sommerville, Secularism at Bay, First Things, 134 (June/July 2003): 11-13.

The chameleon charms with wizardry

to escape his humble lizardry,

blending in with vain show blizzardry,

Chameleon is confused.

The peacock moves with pageantry,

unfolding feathered tapestry,

to hide would be disastery,

Peacock is convinced.

And which will dress our history

bold plumes or image-shiftery?

Word, sacrament, and mystery,

or blending in, confused?

         Richard C. Lambert, Church Clothes

“By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for chaos.”  T. S. Elliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society,” Cambridge Lecture Series, 1939

“The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things.”  Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism

"How can liberal ideas be defended while we call for deep speech, if liberalism in practice means that we remain mute in public about deep things?"  Ken Myers, 2003

"Vanity, vanity. Some movements exhaust themselves only after generations of misspent power. At the moment when its march through the institutions seems complete, this one {humanism} is already dead. The next century will tell us how far a corpse can walk."   Jay Budziszewski, The Humanist Manifesto First Things March, 2000,42-43.

"What [the Springer campaign] tells me is that Democrats apparently have no moral disqualification clause anymore.  It tells me that candidates such as Springer and Larry Flynt, the porn king running for governor in California, are the Exxon Valdez oil slick that is washing up on the beach from the wrecked Supertanker Clinton."

"God is not silly putty."  Peter Bronson, Cincinnati Enquirer, Aug. 10, 2003

"I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them. I never expected the real world to be like the fairy tales. I think that I did expect school to be like the school stories… This distinction holds for adult reading too. The dangerous fantasy is always superficially realistic. The real victim of wishful reverie does not batten on the Odyssey, The Tempest, or The Worm Ouroboros: he (or she) prefers stories about millionaires, irresistible beauties, posh hotels, palm beaches and bedroom scenes, things that really might happen, that ought to happen, that would have happened if the reader had had a fair chance. For, as I say, there are two kinds of longing. The one is ... a spiritual exercise, and the other is a disease."   C. S. Lewis, "On Three Ways of Writing for Children" in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories

Then, welcome each rebuff

That turns earth’s smoothness rough,

Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! 

Be our joys three-parts pain!

Strive, and hold cheap the strain;

Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!      Robert Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra

"Reason is the natural organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning." C. S. Lewis  "Bluspells and Flalansephers" in Selected Literary Essays.

"For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surely contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent”      G.K Chesterton

"Theories that gain acceptance in artificially constrained competitions can claim to be neither most probably true nor most empirically adequate."  Stephen C. Meyer

"We took risks. We knew we took them. Things have come out against us. We have no cause for complaint."  --Scott, found in his diary after the party froze in Antarctica

"The only way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas." L. Pauling (?)

"Actors are terrified to speak out on political issues.”  Alec Baldwin, actor

"The American republic will survive until Congress discovers it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”  Alexis deTocqueville

"A book is the ax with which you break the frozen seas within."  Franz Kafka

"A lot of our cultural disorder is because we have an inadequate view of the meaning of the human."  Ken Myers

"It's not denial... I'm just very selective about the reality accept." Calvin, "Calvin & Hobbes"

The bill of rights went too far.  They should have stopped with  "Congress shall make no law." - Seen at http://www.keepandbeararms.com/

"Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality the cost becomes prohibitive."   William F. Buckley, Jr.

"Naturalism deconstructs the mind."   Philip Johnson

"In [concentration camps] we see evil's final result;   but it is conceived and ordered . . . in clean . . . warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars . .. who do not need to raise their voices."  C. S. Lewis

In the world of political correctness, of course, conclusions need not follow logically from evidence." PC at the NRC , National Association of Scholars

"Let’s roll."  Todd Beamer, 9/11/01

[The atmosphere at the New Yorker in the 1980s] was the crazed cult of contemporaneity, the insistent, relentless outer-directedness of an editor who saw what was hot as always and everywhere preferable to what is true." Some Like It Hot: Tina Brown was the Bill Clinton of Journalism , Andrew Sullivan, Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2002.

"[The falsification of data by the Fish and Wildlife Service] shows how the agencies succumbed to a Clinton-era culture that puts ideology ahead of science. It demonstrates the undue influence environmental groups hold over the departments. It also shows how vaguely written laws like the Endangered Species Act can be used to further political agendas, even in the complete absence of hard science."    The Missing Lynx, Kimberley A. Strassel, Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2002.

"Despite the constant emphasis upon 'the dignity of man' in our own liberal culture, its predominant naturalistic bias frequently results in views of human nature in which the dignity of man is not very clear." Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

"[America] succeeded more obviously than any other nation in making life 'comfortable,[but we] "tried too simply to make sense out of life, [by] striving for harmonies between man and nature, and man and society, and man and his ultimate destiny, which have provisional but no ultimate validity." Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

"Western nations of Europe immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors and stand at the summit of civilization. . . . Looking to future generations there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger, becoming perhaps fixed by inheritance . . . [so that] virtue will be triumphant. . . . American aborigines, Negroes, and Europeans differ as much from each other in mind as any three races that can be named. . . .The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.  At the same time the anthropomorphous apes . . . will no doubt be exterminated.    The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope . . . the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla."   Charles Darwin,    The Descent of Man. Quoted by Benjamin Wiker,  "Darwin and the Descent of Morality," First Things , Nov. 11, 2001, page 10

"The poorer areas, particularly in the South . . . are producing alarmingly more than their share of future generations."     [Birth control] would ease the financial load of caring for, with public funds . . . children destined to become a burden to themselves, to their family, and ultimately to the nation."    Margaret Sanger (Founder of Planned Parenthood) and Clarence Gamble, Birth Control and the Negro , 1939.  Quoted in Wall Street Journal, May 5, 1997.

"From the Soviet gulag to the Nazi concentration camps and the killing fields of Cambodia, history teaches that granting the state legal authority to kill innocent individuals has dreadful consequences. Calling it "termination of life on request" does not change its moral repugnance."  Dutch Courage, Pete DuPont

"Why can't we become happy by imitating the animals?" Wendy Shalit, Modesty Revisited , Imprimis, 30, #3, March 2001.

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire

"You cannot possibly know what is wrong with the world unless you have some idea of what is right." G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World? (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1910) p. 17.

"Truth, of course, must be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves."  G. K. Chesterton

"Words without thoughts never to heaven go."    Shakespeare, Hamlet

"Unfortunately, a great deal of academe lives in a cartoon world whose reigning assumption is that behavior has no consequence."    Stephen H. Blach, NAS Update , Vol. 12 No. 1

"The 'myth' of evolution is as vital to modernism as the ancient theories of creation are central to logocentrism," Louis Markos, From Plato to Postmodernism: Understanding the Essence of Literature and the Role of the Author.

"Before Freud, the conscious mind was privileged over the unconscious."  Louis Markos, From Plato to Postmodernism: Understanding the Essence of Literature and the Role of the Author.

"The son of these tears cannot perish."  Monica's presbyter (priest) quoted by her son Augustine, Confessions 3:12:21

"I was purified by that, the fountain of my mother's eyes." Augustine, Confessions 5:8:15

"If you're going through hell, keep going."  Winston Churchill

"Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status."  Laurence J. Peter

"You do not have to sit outside in the dark,

If, however, you want to look at the stars,

   You will find that darkness is required.

The stars neither require it nor demand it."

                                          Annie Dillard

"Our present life feels like a real fight--as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulness, are needed to redeem."  William James, The Will to Believe

I had far rather walk, as I do, in daily terror of eternity, than feel that this was only a children's game in which all the contestants would get equally worthless prizes at the end. T. S. Eliot

"If the art of shipbuilding were in the wood, there would be ships by nature"  Aristotle, Physis

"Marry the spirit of the age and you will be a widow in the next generation."  Alistair Begg

"Ideally, kings command us to do what the best of our nature would have us do in any case, but, when they don't, trumping power is held by the light of conscience and not by the holder of the scepter." Daniel N. Robinson's interpretation of Sophocles' Antigone

"Virtue ennobles the blood." Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes

"When you're over the hill, you pick up speed."  Unknown

"Everyman is the son of his own works."  Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes

"Since the collapse of communism, environmentalism has become the refuge of Marxism."  Rush Limbaugh

"For what a man would rather be true, he more readily believes."  Francis Bacon

"Nature, to be controlled, must be obeyed."  Francis Bacon, Novum Organum , 1620

"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand." -Josh Billings

"These were days that counted for years in the aging of master and men." Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon, describing Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.

"Individualism is the snake in every socialist paradise."  Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon.

"Maybe the lives of the meritocrats are so crammed because the stakes are so small. All this ambition and aspiration is looking for new tests to ace, new clubs to be president of, new services to perform, but finding that none of these challenges is the ultimate challenge, and none of the rewards is the ultimate reward."  The Organization Kid , Atlantic Monthly, April 2001, page 40-54

"Are they really going to tie up the Senate on behalf of the snail darter or tort lawyers?" The Left: 100 Days In the Wilderness, Robert L. Bartley, Wall Street Journal , April 30, 2001

"The child should not do anything until he comes to the opinion--his own opinion--that it should be done."  A. S. Neill, 1960, author of Summerhill.

"In a rich environment young children can lean a great deal by themselves and most often their own choices reflect their needs."  from The New Republic, 1967

"I don't like Monday's.  This livens up the day."  Brenda Spencer,  1979, 16 yr. old student, after killing two and wounding nine in a California elementary school.

"Education implies teaching.  Teaching implies knowledge.  Knowledge is truth.  Truth is the same everywhere."  Robert Maynard Hutchins

"To spare the mom is, surely, to spoil the child." -- A Mother's Love , Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal , April 23, 2001

"The term 'humanities' includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life."

National Endowment for the Humanities web page in the Clinton era

"Strange, that an era so pleased with its superficially freewheeling and antinomian qualities is actually so distrustful of the literary imagination, so intent upon making its productions conform to preordained criteria."  Wilfred M. McClay, Defining the Humanities Up , First Things, January, 2001, p. 9

"Teaching that man is nothing but a kind of biological machine makes it possible for us to "hide among the animals" and not answer for our conduct." H. O. J. Brown, Quo Vadis, Homo ,  The Religion and Society Report, March 2001.

"Human reason alone, unfounded on a divine cause makes survival the only ethic, but it never answers when, why , or who." Ravi Zacharias

"Humankind is a bubble of consciousness floating on an ocean of nothingness until the bubble pops." Jean-Paul Sartre

"L'homme n'est qu'une passion inutile"  Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. . .. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency."  Aldous Huxley, 1949 Letter, Quoted by Jeffrey Meyer, Orwell:Wintry Conscience of a Generation.

"When a man gives his wealth to his children, he gives part to each.  When a woman give her love to her children she gives all of it to each of them."  Unknown

"The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson in humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in man's total striving to control society--a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but may make him destroy a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals."  Friedrich Heyek

"Each age has its own characteristic depravity. Ours is perhaps not pleasure or indulgence or sensuality, but rather a dissolute pantheistic contempt for the individual man. In the midst of all of our exultation over the achievements of the age . . .there sounds a note of poorly conceived contempt for the individual man; in the midst of the self-importance of the contemporary generation there is revealed a sense of despair over being human. Everything must attach itself so as to be a part of some movement; men are determined to lose themselves in the totality of things, in world-history, fascinated and deceived by a magic witchery; no one wants to be an individual human being."  Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 317.

"Rome and the Atheist have gained:

These two shall fight it out--these two;

Protestantism being retained

for base of operations sly

   by Atheism."

Herman Melville, 1876

"The militants talk about tolerance and practice intolerance.  They talk about diversity and work to impose uniformity.  They talk about democracy and represent no one but the alienated few.  And the talk about peace and invite violence."  William Donahue, Quoted in First Things , March 2001, p.80

"If you believe academic jargon, after all, we've just completed two thousand years of the 'Common Era'--which apparently took over when the Uncommon Era ran out of gas midway through the reign of Caesar Augustus"  Ross G. Southat, Harvard Crimson, Dec. 11, 2000.

"How can a book called "How the Mind Works" evade the responsibility of explaining where this sentence comes from?" Steven Pinker,  How the Mind Works.

"Why are there things that exist rather than nothing at all?" Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics

"The antifat movement was founded on the Puritan notion that something bad had to have an evil cause, and you got a heart attack because you did something wrong, which was eating too much of a bad thing, rather than not having enough of a good thing."  John Powles, quoted in Science 291 , 2543 (2001).  See if you can find this concept in Puritan Literature.

"I think that I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so."..'You have four-hundred years of acquisitive instinct in your blood and you just don't understand how a country might not want to acquire land somewhere if they can get it." . . . "I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige , he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace."  Franklin Roosevelt, Letters to Winston Churchill , 1943, quoted by Paul Johnson, Modern Times , p 433.

"Averell [Harriman] is right.  We can't do business with Stalin, He has broken every one of the promises made a Yalta."  March, 1945, Johnson, page 436.

"No one who was not there will ever understand how fatalistically we [servicemen] viewed the invasion of Japan.  It had to be done and would be.  But each of us felt that survival was unlikely. . .I did want what was left of life.  The bomb gave it to me in my way of reckoning. . .I was grateful and unashamed.  In after years on the faculty of liberal universities, where it was an article of faith that dropping the bombs was a crime against mankind and another instance of American racism, I had to bite my tongue to keep silence. For to have said how grateful I was for the bombs would have marked me as a fascist, the kind of fascist I had spent nearly five years fighting."  Alvin Kernan, Crossing the Line:  The Odyssey of a World War II Bluejacket

"We were supermen, floating above history and precedent, the natural rulers of the universe. . . . The law did not apply to us."  Ben Stein describing the Yale Law School environment of Bill and Hillary Clinton

"The history of modern times is in great part the history of how [the vacuum caused by collapse of the religious impulse] had been filled. Nietzsche rightly perceived that the most likely candidate would be what he called the 'Will to Power', which offered a far more comprehensive and in the end more plausible explanation of human behaviour than either Marx or Freud. In place of religious belief, there would be secular ideology. Those who had once filled the ranks of the totalitarian clergy would become totalitarian politicians. And, above all, the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by any religious sanctions whatever, and with an unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind. The end of the old order, with an unguided world adrift in a relativistic universe, was a summons to such gangsterstatesmen to emerge."  Paul Johnson, Modern Times, Ch. 1.

"Funeral by funeral, theory advances."  Paul Samulson

"Scientists investigate that which already is; engineers create that which has never been." --Albert Einstein

"In public schools we strain out the gnat of graduation prayers and swallow the camel of quasi-secular religion in the curriculum." Ralph Gillman, First Things, October 2000, p. 11

Theology teaches us what ends are desirable and what means are lawful, while Politics teaches what means are effective."  C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock

"Vote early and vote often."  Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, Father of Bill Daley, Al Gore's Florida Campaign Chairman.

"Insects as a group have achieved something that has eluded humans, sustainable development. Insects are the primary consumers of plants, yet they do not merely exploit plants, they also pollinate them, thereby ensuring the plant's reproduction. Humans have yet to strike such a balance between use and conservation of nature. Spiders, in comparison, are a lesser group. . .Most survive by feeding on insects, using venom to kill their prey."   U.  S. Postal Service, Commemorative series on spiders and insects.

"Concerning meta narratives, all this meta, meta, meta talk benefits the chattering classes."  J. Budziszewski

"What will bring this [labor] government down is its arrogant contempt for real people"  William Hague, British Conservative Party Leader

"The vice president [Al Gore] lies reflexively, promiscuously, even pathologically. He lies on matters large and small, significant and trivial, when he "needs" to and when he doesn't, on matters public and private, about his opponents and his family. When asked to come up with an explanation for Mr. Gore's "misstatements," Art Torres, chairman of the California Democratic Party, said, "I have no idea. I'm not a psychiatrist." A Lifetime of Lies, William J Bennett, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 11, 2000

"We forbid any course that says we restrict free speech"  Kathleen Dixon, Director of Women's Studies, Bowling Green State University

"The only thing the party of Franklin Roosevelt has to offer is fear itself."  George W. Bush

"even when we catch the papers in distortion . . . we still come back to them for more. We know it is insubstantial fare, like enchanted food, but we still need that daily fix."  John Sommerville in How the News Makes Us Dumb.

"[Joe Lieberman] is strict and unbending when it comes to kosher catering or avoiding automobiles on the Sabbath, but infinitely flexible concerning respect for human life and other tormenting moral issues." Michael Medved, VP Debate

"If you don't want to use the army, I should like to borrow it for a while.  Yours respectfully, A. Lincoln."  Letter to Gen. George McClellan, 1862

"What is the moral basis for confiscating the wealth of a family that has demonstrated financial prudence and giving it to a government that has demonstrated none?" David R. Heid, Monroeville, Pa. Wall Street Journal Letter, June 15, 2000

"We need to reauthorize [the Violence Against Women Act], to provide the better training and resources and sensitivity to police, judges and public officials that will enable them to respond quickly and understand that it is not just some kind of prank."  Hillary Clinton's NYC crime plan.

"Get Real."  Wall Street Journal, June 15

"There is a difference between talking about compassion and actually putting your highest ideals into practice."  Vice President Al Gore, December 2, 1998, Quoted by, Matt Labash (sic), Sanctimonious Slumlord, Weekly Standard, June 19, 2000/Vol 5, Number 38.

"When the media say an issue is "divisive," they mean it divides majority opinion from their opinion."  Don Feder, Weekly Standard, June 19, 2000

"If current policy had been prevalent in the 19th century, the Attorney General would have been filing suits against abolitionists on behalf of slave owners. " Bob Barr, Rigging the Scales of Justice, Imprimis, May, 2000

"Is it offensive? No. I could quibble with the genitalia, but only because it doesn't work artistically. But it’s much prettier than I expected. Its quite beautiful."  Reverend Barbara Hussan, Episcopal priestess, on viewing Chris Ofili's Virgin Mary covered with elephant dung and pornographic pictures.

"Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us."  Randall Jarrell

"Euclid  alone has looked on beauty bare."

Sonnet , Edna St. Vincent Millay

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,

Rains from the sky a meteoric shower

Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.

Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill

Is daily spun, but there exists no loom

To weave it into fabric.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, in Huntsman, What Quarry?

Yet, do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong,

My love shall in my verse ever live young.

Shakespeare, Sonnet XIX

"You will have noticed that most dogs cannot understand pointing . You point to a bit of food on the floor; the dog, instead of looking at the food, sniffs at your finger. A finger is a finger to him and that is all. His world is all fact and no meaning. And in a world when factual realism is dominant we shall find people deliberately inducing upon themselves this doglike mind." C. S. Lewis  "Transposition" in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses

"Consciousness defies naturalistic explanation."  Todd Moody

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." John Donne From "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions" (1623), XVII: Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris - "Now, this bell tolling softly for another, says to me: Thou must die."

"The difference between the reason of man and the instinct of the beast is this--That the beast does but know, but the man knows that he knows." John Donne, Easter Sermon, April 1628.

"The utopia of mans perfect autonomy and the hope of unlimited perfection may be the most efficient instruments of suicide ever to have been invented. Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial

"Why is it that departures [acts of terrorism] from scriptural ideals in the Muslim world are identified with Islam and similar transgressions in the non-Muslim world stand apart from their religious contexts?" Ralph Braibanti

"Mindless salivating at novelty merely encourages phonies to peddle their inanities to unwarranted Pavlovian acclaim."  John Simon, New York Magazine, March 20, 2000.

"You have to put in the coins to open the gates."  Johnny Chung

"We believe that everything is getting better

 despite evidence to the contrary."

Stephen Turner, Creed

"Empirical knowledge of our biological nature will allow us to make optimum choices among the competing criteria of progress."  Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature

"The principles of justice are . . . the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality."  John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

"We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without the means to measure our descent." Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

"What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"  Micah 6:8

"What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as the instrument."  C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.

"One of the strangest disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies and the sense of scarcity felt by the ostensibly richer societies of today."  Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

"As for school teaching, it is so strenuous that no one should be bound to it for more than ten years."  Martin Luther

"Academic prestige, the emptiest of glories, is a matter of reputation rather than reality;"  J. J. O'Donnell, Augustine the African

"The originality of the 20th century surely lay in its politics. It invented the police state and the command economy, mass mobilization and mass propaganda, mechanized murder and routinized terror breathtaking catalog of criminal and delusional political creativity."  Charles Krauthammer, Cincinnati Enquirer, Jan. 3, 1999.

"But because of the vagaries of history, Americans have spent most of their lives this century in a position of voluntary subordination to their government."  Man and Governance, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 31, 1999

". . .for the repentance from better to worse is a change not permitted to us."  Polycarp to the Roman Proconsul, Martrydom of Polycarp 11:1

"The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson in humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in man's total striving to control society--a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but may make him destroy a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals."   Friedrich Heyek

"Engineering the engineer as well as the engine, we race our train, we know not where."  Leon Kass

"Any language that may be deemed sexist, racist or homophobic, or may be found offensive by any minority group, is prohibited. Use of such language can result in immediate failure of that paper and possible future action." Course Syllabus, Speech Communications, University of Maine

"…….but man, proud man.

Dressed in a little brief authority,

Most ignorant of what he's most assured

His glassy essence like an angry ape

Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

As makes the angels weep."

William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

"We the delegates of the people of Virginia . . . do in the name and on the behalf of the people of Virginia, declare and make known, that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the people of the United States, may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression, and that every power not granted thereby remains with them, and at their will. That therefore no right, of any denomination, can be canceled, abridged, restrained or modified by the Congress, by the Senate, or House of Representatives, acting in any capacity, by the President, or any department or officer of the United States, except in those instances where power is given by the Constitution for those purposes."  Virginia General Assembly, 1788

"After 'the war to end war they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris at making a 'peace to end peace.'"  Archibald Wavell, British officer in the Palestine campaign, W.W.I

"For I see a man must either resolve to put out nothing new or to become a slave to defend it."  Isaac Newton, 1677

"Your manuscript is both good and original. However, that which is good is not original, and that which is original is not good."  Samual Johnson

"[Communism is] a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written."  Ronald Reagan, Notre Dame, 1981

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."  Ronald Reagan

 "Disney is like the dope dealer in the schoolyard, offering free samples of crack to children in order to create future demand for hard-core poison."  Matthew P. Harrington, Letter, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 3, 1999

"We are often unable to tell people what they need to know, because they want to know something else."  Gerorge MacDonald, Lilith, Ch. 7.

"Postmodernism as a philosophical groundwork for politic ultimately is as shifting sand when it comes to having something solid on which to base what we want in society, be it the emancipation of groups within society, the promotion of democracy abroad or encouraging the spread of the human rights culture. This is an issue we need to consider carefully, for few of us hold that the powerful should do what the powerful can do, and fewer of us still would like to live in a world where such attained." Anthony J. Langlois, Postmodernism and a Hurting World

"Through this process over several centuries of destroying universal moral ideals by questioning their scientific objectivity, the supposedly enlightened industrial nations with democratic governments repeatedly face crises of social conflict and violence that they find it hard to oppose." Richard Gelwick, The Calling of Being Human, Polanyia, 1996

"The scientist's urge to ponder new problems and break new paths in seeking to solve them, presents us with the essential restlessness of the human mind, which calls ever again in question any satisfaction that it may have previously achieved."  Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge

"Maturity is the ability to live with ambiguity."  Elisabeth Elliot, Keep a Quit Heart

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." William Butler Yeats

"If you can't convince them, confuse them."  Harry S. Truman

"Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature."  George Bernard Shaw

"A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin." H.L. Mencken

"We all must keep our hatred alive. . .hate that can push a human being beyond his natural limits & make him a cold, violent, selective, & effective killing-machine."  Che Guevara

"You have heard that is was said love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I tell you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." Jesus, Matt. 5:43

"If one hundred doctors need to die to save over one million babies a year, I see it as a fair trade."  Alabama Preacher, USA Today, Aug. 16, 1993

"Live in harmony with one another.  Do not repay anyone evil for evil.  Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody.  If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.   Do not take revenge"  Paul of Tarsus, Romans 12:16-19.

"Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die." Herbert Hoover

"Science has never sought to ally herself with civil power. She has never subjected anyone to mental torment, physical torment, least of all death, for the purpose of promoting her ideas."  John W. Draper

"It does not require many words to speak the truth."  Chief Joseph

"The struggle is my life."  Nelson Mandela

"What luck for rulers that men do not think."  Adolf Hitler

Only actions give life strength; only moderation gives it charm.   Jean Paul Richter

A timid person is frightened before danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterwards.   Jean Paul Richter

"Fair is foul and foul is fair

into the fog and filthy air."

           Macbeth (7th line), William Shakespeare

"We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain and where to submit. He, or she, who does not know to do so understands not the force of reason. There are some who offend against these rules either by affirming everything as demonstrative, from want of knowing what demonstration is, or by doubting everything from want of knowing where to submit, or by submitting to everything from want of knowing where they must judge."    Blaise Pascal

"Nothing will shake a man. . .out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself."  C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

"Adults regress toward adolescence; and adolescents--seeing that--have no desire to become adults.''  Robert Bly, The Sibling Society

Believe what you want. These walls are funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. After long enough, you get so you depend on 'em. That's "institutionalized."     Red "The Shawshank Redemption"

. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . . What is a man,

        If his chief good and market of his time

        Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.

        Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,

        Looking before and after, gave us not

        That capability and god-like reason

        To fust in us unused.

           William Shakespeare, Hamlet  IV, iv

"Dying ain't much of a livin', boy,"  Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood), in Outlaw Josey Wales

"If God does not exist, man is in consequence forlorn.  For he cannot find anything to depend on either inside or outside himself.  Morals are for us then both unavoidable and impossible."  Jean-Paul Sarte

"I don't know where were going or how we'll get there, but when we get there we'll be there and thats something even if its nothing."  S. D. A. Pearlman

"There is nothing worse than an amputated spirit. . ..for which there is no prosthetic."  Lt. Col. Frank Slade (Al Pacino), The Scent of a Woman

"Humankind is a bubble of consciousness floating on an ocean of nothingness until the bubble pops."

Jean-Paul Sarte

"Plurality is a safeguard against the arrogance and tyranny to which man has the most characteristic proclivity."  John Murray

"What I fear are attempts to separate language or discourse from the real and to do so in the name of freedom."  Thomas Kuhn

"All this new science didn't just happen. It had to be incubated. If the U.S. can preserve the environment that hatches inventions, it can look forward with optimism to the 21st century. Present evidence suggests that the 21st may even outstrip the 20th as a century of science."

George Melloan, America's 'New Economy' Is Technology, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 21, 1999

"Life wouldn't be what it is today if we didn't have oxygen in the atmosphere and in the ocean."

Roger Summons, chief research scientist, Australia Geological Survey Organization

It matters not how straight the gate

How charged with punishments the scroll

I am the master of my fate

I am the captain of my soul

Invictus, William Earnest Henley

And shall I pray Thee change Thy will my Father,

Until it be according unto mine?

But no, Lord, no, that shall never be, rather

I pray Thee blend my human will with Thine.

I pray Thee hush the hurrying eager longing

I pray Thee soothe the pangs of keen desire.

See in my quiet places wishes thronging,

Forbid them, Lord, purge, though it be with fire.

And work in me to will and do Thy pleasure.

Let all within me, peaceful, reconciled,

Tarry content my Wellbeloved’s leisure,

At last, at last, even as a weaned child.

         My Prayer, Amy Charmichael, Quoted by Elisabeth Elliot, A Chance to Die, The  Life and Legacy of Amy Charmichael

[German biblical critics] ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts: the evidence is their obvious inability to read. . .the lines themselves."  C. S. Lewis,  Christian Reflections

"..a stereotyped image can obliterate a man's own experience." C. S. Lewis, De DecriptioneTemporum (Inaugural Lecture, Cambridge, 1934)

What's in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet;

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

"It is not the remembered but the forgotten past that enslaves us. . ..The unhistorical are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past."  C. S. Lewis, De DecriptioneTemporum (Inaugural Lecture, Cambridge, 1934)

"Unlike other nations, American identity is not based on ethnicity or geography. It's based on a moral proposition. This proposition comes straight from the faded and yellowed document: The Declaration of Independence."               Chuck Colson, Breakpoint, 7/2/99

"Secularism isn't a way of getting on without suppositions, but a way of getting on without admitting to anyone what they are."

J. Budziszewski,    " The Future of the End of Democracy ," First Things, March, 1999.

"Utopianism has been among the most pervasive myths of our age." Charles Colson

"Those ants outnumber us a hundred to one. If they ever figure that out, its the end of our way of life."     Hopper, in A Bug's Life

"The Democratic party is going to take back God this time.."  Elaine Karmack, Al Gore speech writer

"This administration has shown a real genius for pre-empting the best Republicans proposals like the balanced budget.  But this is what successful politicians have always done."  Bob Zelnick, Al Gore Biographer

"The secular project has undone the humanism project."   Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio Journal, Vol. 37, 1999

"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."

Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

  "We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the universe."

Peter Atkins, The Second Law

 "Is there any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche's philosophy seriously and fashioned his life on it? . . . Your Honor, it is hardly fair to hang a nineteen-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university."  Clarence Darrow, defending Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two university students who had murdered a boy for the intellectual experience.

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player _That struts and frets his hour upon the stage _And then is heard no more: it is a tale _Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, _Signifying nothing. _William Shakespeare, Macbeth

"The boys who did the killing, the famous Trench Coat Mafia, inhaled too deep the ocean in which they swam."

Peggy Noonan, The Culture of Death, Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1999

_"Liberal secularists continue to put faith in the doctrine that what is in the human hand is more important than what is in the human heart."

Cal Thomas

_ "Because of recent violence in small cities and towns this is a time when Americans are searching for the causes of violence in their society. No one seems to be asking whether pesticides, fertilizers and toxic metals are affecting our young people's mental capacity, emotional balance, and social adjustment."

Peter Montague, Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly, April, 1999

"I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war." William Jefferson Clinton

"That option [of ground troops] is not under consideration . . . that option was removed from consideration."  Al Gore

"I have always said . . . that we have not and will not take any option off the table."    William Jefferson Clinton

"To the best of my knowledge" (he wasn't even under oath) "no one has said anything to me about any espionage which occurred by the Chinese against the labs during my presidency."       William Jefferson Clinton

 "[Mr. Clinton was] fully, fully briefed [on espionage in] past and present administrations."

   Bill Richardson, Secretary of Energy

"Had we faltered, the result would have been a moral and strategic disaster. . . The Kosovars would have become a people without a homeland, living in difficult conditions in some of the poorest countries of Europe. . ."

William Jefferson Clinton, New York Times May 24, 1999

"We're right back where we were before the bombing, except a million people are gone.  It's a mess."

Senator Rob Portman, R-OH

"[that] Tomahawk missiles have allowed American president to play a video game of death without risk is a very dangerous and corrupting concept."

 Newt Gingrich, GOPAC, May 24, 1999

 "I think it's impossible even for the ACLU to successfully file a lawsuit saying you can't teach the Declaration of Independence. "

   Newt Gingrich, GOPAC, May 24, 1999

"Just because you have the right to say something doesn't mean it's the right thing to say."

Fred Friendly, CBS News, Retired

"This country has spent about 30 years trying very hard to prove that no one, not even children, should be fettered by anyone else's idea of proper behavior. . .Are we happy yet?"

    Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1999

"You can't know how you're going to feel when you become a mother.  This is motherhood's greatest joy and darkest secret.  Suddenly, you can't stop thinking about your child."

Danielle Crittenden, What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us

 "Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing."

 Redd Foxx

"A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education."

 G. B. Shaw

"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence."

 H. L. Mencken

"Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the situation."

 Unknown

"A cynic is a person searching for an honest man, with a stolen lantern."

Edgar A. Shoaff

"Part of growing up is learning how to control one's impulses."

Hillary Rodham Clinton introducing William Jefferson Clinton, April 27, 1999

"Postmodernism, a wayward stepchild of Marxism, is in this sense a generation's realization that it is orphaned."

Lawrence Cahoone, From Modernism to Postmodernism

 "Friedrich Nietzsche's radical critique of metaphysics, the unity of the self, even of truth itself, and his conception of all reality and all values as expressing 'the will to power,' make him the grandfather of postmodernism."

Lawrence Cahoone, From Modernism to Postmodernism

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

Judith Butler, University of California at Berkeley. (Quoted in The Wall Street Journal, 2/5/99)

"If an administration may with impunity deliberately create a condition of war anywhere in the world, representative government itself is imperiled."

Harry Summers, Military Historian

"..the Sabbaths are our great cathedrals' and our Holy of Holies is a shrine that neither the Romans nor the Germans were able to burn."

   Abraham Joshua Herschel

"Civilization is easy to undo but difficult to surpass."

Martin E. Marty, Context, April 1, 1999

"By and large we do know right from wrong, but wish we didn't. . . .It hardly needs to be said that no one has been able to come up with a criterion that makes babies in the womb less human but leaves everyone else as he was; the teeth of the moral gears are too finely set for that."

J. Budziszewski, The Revenge of The Conscience

"it the Communist attacking the family or the Capitalist betraying the family; it is the vast and very astonishing vision of the Hitlerite defending the family. Hitler's way of defending the independence of the family is to make every family dependent on him and his semi-Socialist State; and to preserve the authority of parents by authoritatively telling all the parents what to do. . . . In other words, he appears to interfere with family life more even than the Bolshevists do; and to do it in the name of the sacredness of the family."

G. K. Chesterton, The Well and the Shadows

"The trouble with America is that we believe in values and not in principles."

Ken Myers, The Eclipse of God and Man in Culture, 1999

"But I also think that there will be a box score, and there will be that one negative. And then there will be the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times when the record will show that I did not abuse my authority as president, that I was truthful with the American people, and scores and scores of allegations were made against me and widely publicized without any regard to whether they were true or not. Most of them have already been actually proved false (sic)."

William Jefferson Clinton, 2/19/99

"No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has imagined what we can build"

William Jefferson Clinton, 1994

 "No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him."

(1 Corinthians 2:9, NIV, quoting Isaiah 64:4.)

 "He who will not reason is a bigot, he who cannot is a fool, and he who dare not is a slave."

Sir William Drummond

 "Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united--united with each other and against earlier and later ages by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century--the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?"--lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths, which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books."

C. S. Lewis in the Introduction to the English Translation of Athanasius, "De Incarnatione Verbi Dei."

 "If a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of 500 yards I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man."

G. K. Chesterton

"There is really no escaping the American Culture anymore. . ."

    Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal, Feb. 12, 1999

"The good news is that you're credible.  The bad news is you're very credible."

Lisa Myers, NBC, Juanita Broaddrick Interview

 "Part of our problem is the unquestioned cultural belief that autonomy gives us both our dignity and our personhood. In reality, it is the fact that we are persons, with endowments of intellect and will, which makes autonomy possible. If our dignity and autonomy are not anchored in what we are as persons, then our choices as well as our worthwhileness are subject to any current of cultural approval or personal satisfaction. If the anchor is our shared personhood, however, it becomes the primary moral task of any culture and every person to recognize and honor that dignity in every public law and private choice."

John F. Kavanaugh, America, 12/5/98

I now have a 7-year old boy and a 9-year-old boy, so all I can say is, "I apologize."

Matt Goerning, creator and producer of "The Simpsons," when asked about the Bart Simpson role model.

"Technically, I'm an agnostic, but I definitely believe in hell--espcecially after watching the fall TV schedule."

Matt Goerning

"Calling it a relationship between consenting adults is to ascribe adult behavior to it."

Chuch Raasch, Cincinnati Enquirer, 3/6/99

_ "My life is filled with misfortunes, most of which haven't happened yet."

Mark Twain

"..the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

George Orwell

"You may be sure, dear Crito, that inaccurate language is not only in itself a mistake: it implants evil in men's souls."

Socrates in Plato's Phaedo Dialog

"I was never really alone with Monica, right?"

William Jefferson Clinton to Betty Currie

"The English never draw a line without blurring it."

Winston Churchill

 "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."

Winston Churchill

 "Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse."

Winston Churchill

 "Bid the dishonest man mend himself; if he mend, he is no longer dishonest."

William Shakespeare

 "When law is divorced from the moral sanction of religious convictions, presently the law is corrupted by passion, prejudice, private interest, and misguided sentimentality."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

 "The humanitarian's visions issue from between the delusory gates of ivory; justice issues from between the gates of horn."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason but no morals. We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character that is the goal of true education."

Martin Luther King, Jr.

 "They have packaged our virtue in cellulose dreams

 Sold us the remnants until our pockets are clean

 Until our hopes fall 'round our feet like the dust of dead leaves

 And we end up looking like what we believe."                                             ORPHANS OF GOD - Mark Heard 1951-1992

 "Whether her [Rigoberta Menchu, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992] book is true or not, I don't care. We should teach our students about the brutality of the Guatemalan military and the U.S. financing of it."

Marjorie Agosin, head of the Spanish department at Wellesley College

"Those who are incapable of committing great crimes will not easily suspect others of doing so."

Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld

"The proliferation of articles and books espousing theories of desire and psychic subjection attests to the fact that the academy isn't immune to the obsession with novelty. Simple human suffering is a fashion victim for those on the cutting edge of the academy. The feminist academy may be faced with a challenge: to liberate its audiences from both self-evident generalizations about human rights and self-absorbed (and lucrative) meditations on the perverse."

Elsa Davidson, graduate student,December 9,1998 issue of Feed

"Well, I think that, if all that [lying to cover up adultery] were proven true, I think that would be a very serious offense."

Hillary Clinton, interview with  NBC's Matt Lauer, Jan. 27, 1998

The time has come. _The time is now. _Just go. Go. GO! _I don't care how.

Dr. Suess, Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Go Now?

"Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth."

Aristotle

 "When lawyers talk sin and preachers talk politics, surely the demons in hell rejoice."

Cal Thomas, Dec. 14, 1998

"the landscape of the Clinton Presidency is littered with undetonated landmines that will be going off for years."

Wall Street Journal, Dec. 14, 1998

"The term "spin" is more than a harmless, '90s figure of speech. It is a gradual twisting of truth, blurring the lines between right and wrong to the point where all responsibility is avoided and reality is questioned"

Nancy Roth Cooper, Cincinnati Enquirer, Letter to the Editor,12/6/98

 "The political arguments against beauty are incoherent."

    Prof. Elaine Scarry (sic), Harvard

 "I do not recall the precise wording of that oath"

William Jefferson Clinton referring to the oath "to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth"

 "She's gonna be shovellin' mud. Then she'll wipe the sweat from her brow, like this. Make sure you get that shot, all right?"

Nathan Naylor, White House Spinmeister choreographing compassion for Tipper Gore in Honduras

 "Mass Found in Elusive Particle: Universe May Never Be the Same"

       Headline, New York Times, June 27, 1998

 "Democratic liberty depends upon our ability to invest a text with ordering authority, to allow the text to stand as a rock of stability and secure point of reference to which one can repair amid the confusing and disorienting currents of life. But when such texts become rendered endlessly fluid and problematic, they eventually become the property of a hermeneutical class, which then constitutes itself, rather than the text, as the real ordering authority--a government, so to speak, of men and not laws."

Wilfred M. McClay, Mr. Emerson's Tombstone

"Even without a broad report of Mr. Starr's findings, the public record as established over two terms by hearings and courageous reporting has produced a broad pattern of first, abuse, and then obstruction of legitimate attempts to account for each abuse."

Wall Street Journal, A Clear Constitutional Duty .

 "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Senator Barry Goldwater, Died May 29, 1998

"Any society, however sincere, that believes in the equality of all ideas will pave the way for the loss of the good ones."

Ravi Zacharias, Veritas Forum

"But as bleak world views deconstruct themselves to the point of depletion -- if nothing really matters, why even bother to say that?"

Greg Easterbrook, New Republic, Oct. 12, 1998

"Under the modern revised system of American government, the three relevant government branches consist of pundits, pollsters and spinmeisters."

Wall Street Journal, June 2, 1998

“Pecunia non olet, "Money doesn't stink," the Roman Emperor Vespasian answered his son Titus when the younger man reproached his father for taking a cut of the fees for Rome's public latrines. Tobacco smoke stinks, even second-hand tobacco smoke, and fresh tobacco also has a smell, but not, it seems, the money that can be plundered from the tobacco companies and from the dwindling and embattled number of cigarette smokers.”

Harold O. J. Brown, Religion and Society Report, June, 1998

  ". . .maybe what Clinton did in the Oval Office was love, or infatuation, or just sex," [but at least it was] "a desire to make a connection with another person"

Jane Smiley , Commentator

"If a president of the United States ever lied to the American people he should resign."

William Jefferson Clinton

"I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky"

William Jefferson Clinton

"I didn't inhale."

William Jefferson Clinton

"My administration will be the most ethical in history"

William Jefferson Clinton

"These are but wild and whirling words, my Lord."

Shakespeare

"Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts."

D. H. Lawrence

"A secret shared by two is no longer a secret."

unknown

"The devil's most devilish when respectable."

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"I can not tell a lie"

George Washington

"I will be good"

Queen Victoria

"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Sir Issac Newton

"We must make our homes centers of compassion and forgive endlessly."

Mother Teresa

"Fiat justitia et ruant coeli."  "Let justice be done though the heavens fall."

William Watson

"Civius Romus sum."  "I am a Roman citizen."

Cicero

"In language, the ignorant have prescribed laws to the learned."

Richard Duppa

"No power so effectively robs the mind of all it's powers of acting and reasoning as fear."

Edmund Burke

"Fear is the parent of cruelty."

J. A. Froude

"One more such victory and we are lost."

Pyrrhus

"To govern is to make choices."

Duc de Levis

"Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggy' until you can find a big rock."

Will Rogers

"I am a bear of very little brain, and long words bother me."

Winnie-the-Pooh

"Government is like a big baby: a big appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other."

Ronald Reagan

"But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous- why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

. . . pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like willful travelers in Lapland, who refuse to wear colored and coloring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?"

Herman Melville, Moby Dick , Chapter 42, The Whiteness of the Whale

"If I were pregnant now I would go out and have an abortion.  I find your so called reverence for life a joke.  Do what you want with your own life and leave the rest of us alone."

Anne Taylor Fleming, 1974 Debate with Phyllis Schlafly

 "I am now one of them, this sisterhood of the infertile. .. I am tempted to role down the window and shout into the smoggy Los Angeles air:  'Hey, Hey, Gloria, Germain, Kate!   Tell us how it was to have ended up without babies, children, flesh of your flesh?'. . .  Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf.  Tell me was your art worth the empty womb? . . . I am a lonesome babyless babyboomer, now completely consumed by the longing for a baby. . .I am a woman of forty who put career ahead of motherhood, and now long for motherhood. . . "

Ann Taylor Fleming, 1994, Motherhood Deferred: A Woman's Journey

"We can do no great things; only small things with great love."

Mother Teresa

"What you applaud, you encourage. Watch out what you celebrate."

Peggy Noonan

 "the same attribute cannot, at the same time, belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect."

Aristotle, Metaphysics

 "Aristotle was not demanding that his opponent say that something is or is not the case.  He recognized that this would beg the question.  All he asked was that his opponent say something significant for someone else as well as for himself.  If he either says nothing or says that which has no meaning, he will be unable to reason. . .It is impossible to meaningfully deny the laws of logic. . .If the laws of logic do not first mean what they say, nothing else can have meaning, including the denial of the laws."

Ronald H. Nash, The Word of God and the Mind of Man

  "The plausible person [of the postmodern era] is the analog of the two-dimensional image on a television screen, a moving picture of a role that stirs the emotions of the viewers. He is a spectacle and a communicator not of ideas, but of sentiments." 

_Louis R. Tarsitano, Touchstone

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