Sense and
Non-Sense
ÒWhen there's no place for the scalpel, words
are the surgeon's only tool.Ó Paul
Kalanithi,
When Breath Becomes Air.
ÒToo often, we judge other groups by their worst
examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions.Ó George W. Bush, Dallas Memorial, 7/12/16
ÒTo read in the service of any ideology is not,
in my judgment, to read at all.Ó Harold Bloom
"This is my last election. After my election, I have
more flexibility." Barak Obama to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, March
26, 2012
ÒI did think I saw heaven
open, and saw the very face of God.Ó George Frideric
Handel on finishing "Hallelujah Chorus."
ÒOur 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.Ó Royce Spalding in Places in the Heart.
ÒWITH 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 doesnÕt matter. Debt doesnÕt matter? Really? ThatÕs the most
irresponsible fiscal notion since the tax-cutting mania brought on by the
advent of supply-side economics. And itÕs particularly problematic right now,
as Congress resumes debating whether to extend the payroll-tax reduction or
enact other stimulative measures.Ð
ÒThe dangerous notion that debt doesnÕt matter,Ó New York Times, Jan. 20, 2012
ÒBecause progressivism
exists to justify a few people bossing around most people and because
progressives believe that only governmentÕs energy should flow unimpeded, they
crave energy scarcities as an excuse for rationing Ñ by them Ñ that produces
ever-more-minute government supervision of AmericansÕ behavior.Ó George
Will 2012
ÒCivilization has always
depended upon two great pillars Ð 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.Ó 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.
ÒIn 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.Ó Vox Day, Choosing Collapse, Dec.
3, 2011.
Ò[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. Ò University of Cincinnati Diversity
Plan, 2011
ÒAs 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 classÉ.There is a
fundamental divide between É upward mobility and promoting class
cohesion. I think ObamaÕs 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.
ÒThe 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.Ó Wall Street Journal, Nov. 9, 2011
ÒThoroughly worldly people
never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims
which are not true.Ó G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy,
1908
Ò[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 jobsÑmore hiring." Jay
Carney, August 11, 2011 Press Conference. Reported by Stephen Moore, Why
Americans Hate Economics, Wall Street Journal, Aug. 19, 2011
ÒThe 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.Ó Laurie Essig, The Chronicle of
Higher Education, Aug. 7, 2011.
ÒI 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.Ó Bruce L Hargraves, USN Retired
ÒThe fact that we are here
today to debate raising AmericaÕs debt limit is a sign of leadership failure.
It is a sign that the U.S. Government canÕt pay its own bills. It is a sign
that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to
finance our GovernmentÕs reckless fiscal policies. É Increasing AmericaÕs debt
weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that Òthe buck
stops here.Ó 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. Ò
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
ÒLiberals despise the rule
of law because it interferes with their ability to rule by mob. É 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.Ó Ann Coulter, NY
Times: Fraught Nexus of Lies, Stupidity, and Bigotry. 6/22/2011
ÒAffirmative action,
at bottom, represents a radical redefinition of rights. It focuses not on an
individualÕs 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.Ó 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
ÒThe 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.Ó George W. Bush
After the Capture of Saddam Hussein.
ÒI 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.Ó 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
ÒWrite kindnesses in
marble. Write injuries in the sand.Ó Persian Proverb
"Racial criteria are
irrational, irrelevant, [and] odious to our way of life." Thurgood Marshal
ÒThe 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 Ôcivility.ÕÓ
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)
ÒWe 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.Ó Students' Right to Their Own Language, Conference
on College Composition and Communication, National Council of Teachers of
English, 1974
ÒThe 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.Ó Erika Lindermam, "Three Views of Composition," College
English 57( 3), 1995, Page 287.
ÒAnd 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.Ó 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.Ó Christopher F. Chabris reviewing How to Wake Up Slumbering Minds by
Daniel T. Willingham, Wall Street Journal, April 27, 2009
ÒBut we have to pass the
bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the
controversy.Ó Ð 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
ÒI think they are making
fun of us. ItÕs a pile of bricks.Ó 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
ÒWe 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.Ó Winston Churchill.
ÒWe might have been a free
and great people together.Ó Thomas Jefferson quoted by Peggy Noonan, A
Cold ManÕs Warm Words, Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2010.
ÒI'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-selectedÉThe 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
ÒRich people need to
understand how poor people live and poor people need to understand how rich
people work.Ó Sig Alpha, Grand Junction, CO.
ÒThe tea partiers are
protesting against exactly what the Greeks are demanding.Ó Slouching Towards
Athens, Arthur C. Brooks, Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2010
ÒThis Bible is for the
government of the people, by the people and for the peopleÓ 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 environmentÉ Knowledge always stands in relation to
the context from it was derived and the experience of the observer who must
make sense of it.Ó Gary D. Borich, Effective
Teaching Methods: Research-Based Practice. 6th edition,
Pearson-Merrill Prentice Hall, Columbus, OH, 2007
ÒEffective 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. ÔEducation implies teaching. Teaching implies knowledge.
Knowledge is truth. Truth is the same everywhere.ÕÓ University of
Cincinnati College of Engineering Master Plan, M10 (Draft), April, 2009
ÒAs the welfare state
became the War on Poverty, federal money went not to the individual but to
Ôservices.Õ 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. Éthe solutions to the problems of our nationÕs Harlems
will never be found in its HarvardsÉ.One
of the lessons of the 1960s is that elitism is more devastating to the interests
of poor people than racism is.Ó Robert L. Woodson, President Neighborhood
Enterprise, Washington DC. Centennial Review, Vol 1, December 2009.Ò
"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)
ÒItÕs 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. ThatÕs the question facing the universities today. What will
serve as the basis for the educational enterprise?Ó Dallas Willard, Professor of Philosophy,
University of Southern California.
ÒI think people donÕt
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. Ò Mary S.
Poplin, Professor of Education, Claremont Graduate University.
"Leadership is
stewardship, not ownership." Rick Warren, Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency.
ÒThe 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.Ó 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
ÒWhy should the right wing
be allowed to monopolize the intellectual high ground?Ó 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
lucidÐthere 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 Òcoordinate.Ó
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
ÒOur 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.Ó 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 centuryÐracially 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.
ÒBecause they are underfunded,
state institutions have become too weakened to incorporate the successful
strategies of for-profit institutions.Ó Jack B. Jewett, Trusteeship,
Jan/Feb 2003, page 7
ÒLife, What a Beautiful
Choice.Ó Ad, 1994, De Moss Foundation
ÒChoice, What a Beautiful
Life.Ó 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
ÒRhetorical 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.
ÒÉthe 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 creedsÉ. The rhetoric of postmodern pragmatism
creates a moral universe in which the self that would use language to Ôhelp get
us what we wantÕ (Rorty) discovers itself brought
into bondage by the very tool it sought to master.ÓÉ
The language of postmodern pragmatics can imagine no goal for human striving
beyond that of Rieff's Ômanipulatable
sense of well-being.Õ 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 possibleÉ. 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 lifeÉ.
Whatever tool you choose to use to enhance your own well-being does not matter;
only your freedom in choosing does.Ó 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 freeÉ 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 anybodyÕs, 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
ÒBy 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.Ó T. S. Elliot, ÒThe Idea
of a Christian Society,Ó Cambridge Lecture Series, 1939
ÒThe terrorists speak
insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally
deep things.Ó 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 storiesÉ 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 earthÕs
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 discontentÓ 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.Ó Alec Baldwin, actor
"The American republic
will survive until Congress discovers it can bribe the public with the publicÕs
money.Ó 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
"LetÕs
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 itÕs 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
"ÉÉ.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 WellbelovedÕs 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
ÒPecunia
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.Ó
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