“Yet there was, of course, in the failure of priests and pastors to live up to their own teaching, nothing new. ‘We are all naturally prone to hypocrisy.’ So Calvin had acknowledged. The flesh was weak. That change – and it was one that had occurred with a startling rapidity – was the readiness of people to accept that the exacting ideals of Christian sexual morality might not be ideals at all. That sexual desires were natural, and therefore good, and that the coming of Christianity had been like a blast of grey breath on the world, had long been a conviction popular with the more aristocratic class of free thinker. ‘Our religions, our manners and customs may easily and indeed must perforce deceive us,’ as the Marquis de Sade had put it, ‘whilst we shall certainly never be misled by the voice of Nature.’ This, over the course of the 1960s, had become a manifesto shared by millions. The summer of love had been a celebration of body as well as of spirit. ‘Make love, not war, the hippies urged. To many, it had seemed that two thousand years of neurosis and self-hatred were being banished upon the weaving of flowers in the hair. Desires natural to men and women, long kept in check, had at last been restored to freedom. Once again, the moving of the phallus in the bright womb of the world was praised as something precious: as ‘the victory of yes and love’. One music journalist, writing in San Francisco as 1967 turned to fall, had cast America as a stagnant swamp suddenly brought to life by the shimmering through its waters of a god. Ralph Gleason, the founder of Rolling Stone, most successful of all the many magazines inspired by the counterculture of the 1960s, had identified its spirit of sexual freedom with that of classical Greece. Society, he had declared, was being ‘deeply stirred by Dionysiac currents’. The ancient gods were back. Except that the freedom to fuck when and as one liked had tended to be, in antiquity, the perk of a very exclusive subsection of society: powerful men. Zeus, Apollo, Dionysus: all had been habitual rapists.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“I think we may jest on any subject. But I do not think that we may jest on any occasion.”

G.K. Chesterton in Daily News September 1, 1906, quoted in “Can’t You Take A Joke?” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

“The issue that is not clear to organizers, missionaries, educators, or any outsider, is simply that if people feel they don't have the power to change a bad situation, then they do not think about it.”

Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals

“From that day, with characteristic pertinacity, he [Cato the Elder] ended all his speeches in the Senate, on whatever subject, with his dour conviction: Caterum censeo delendam esse Carthaginem – ‘Besides, I think that Carthage must be destroyed.’”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“A sense of humor. Back to Webster's Unabridged: humor is defined as ‘The mental faculty of discovering, expressing, or appreciating ludicrous or absurdly incongruous elements in ideas, situations, happenings, or acts...’ or ‘A changing and uncertain state of mind…’ The organizer searching with a free and open mind void of certainty, hating dogma, finds laughter not just a way to maintain his sanity but also a key to understanding life. Essentially, life is a tragedy; and the converse of tragedy is comedy. One can change a few lines in any Greek tragedy and it becomes a comedy, and vice versa. Knowing that contradictions are the signposts of progress he is ever on the alert for contradictions. A sense of humor helps him identify and make sense out of them. Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule. A sense of humor enables him to maintain his perspective and see himself for what he really is: a bit of dust that burns for a fleeting second. A sense of humor is incompatible with the complete acceptance of any dogma, any religious, political, or economic prescription for salvation. It synthesizes with curiosity, irreverence, and imagination. The organizer has a personal identity of his own that cannot be lost by absorption or acceptance of any kind of group discipline organization. I now begin to understand what I stated somewhat intuitively in Reveille for Radicals almost 20 years ago, that ‘the organizer in order to be part of all can be part of none.’”

Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [he’s listing the ideal elements for an organizer and I found the notion that left-wing radicals are consistently marked by a good sense of humour especially about themselves was itself so funny it was worth quoting].

“A hundred men who will are stronger than a hundred thousand who shall.”

Arthur Schopenhauer in 1919, quoted in Sven Rydenfelt A pattern for failure: socialist economies in crisis

“As the Danish folk saying goes, ‘You bake with the flour you have.’ But anyone can learn a few tools.”

Chris Voss with Tahl Raz Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if your life depended on it

“On 16 July 2018, one of the world’s best-known scientists, a man as celebrated for his polemics against religion as for his writings on evolutionary biology, sat listening to the bells of an English cathedral. ‘So much nicer than the aggressive-sounding “Allahu Akhbar”,’ Richard Dawkins tweeted. ‘Or is that just my cultural upbringing?’ The question was a perfectly appropriate one for an admirer of Darwin to ponder…. A preference for church bells over the sound of Muslims praising God does not just emerge by magic. Dawkins – agnostic, secularist and humanist that he is – absolutely has the instincts of someone brought up in a Christian civilization. Today, as the flood tide of Western power and influence ebbs, the illusions of European and American liberals risk being left stranded.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World