"'Unless you assume a God, the question of life’s purpose is meaningless.’ – Bertrand Russell, atheist"
2nd header quotation in Rick Warren The Purpose-Driven Life Chapter 1
"'Do you believe in God, Winston?' ‘No.’ ‘Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?’ ‘I don’t know. The spirit of Man.’ ‘And do you consider yourself a man?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man. Your kind is extinct; we are the inheritors.'"
O'Brien and Winston Smith in George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four
"The main impulse of a true genius is not to look into himself, with endless digging into his conscience and subconscious - as Pasternak said, ‘conscience is like the headlights of a car; their light directed outward illuminates the way, directed inward leads to catastrophe’ - but to look out of himself. And to give. And if the main impulse of your existence is the desire to give, you cannot really be a nasty character. That’s what, probably, Pushkin had in mind when he exclaimed in his Mozart and Salieri: 'Genius and villainy are incompatible.'"
Chronicles magazine 1/88 [again I had regrettably not yet in 1988 acquired the habit of recording the author as well as publication when I recorded points I considered noteworthy]
“I find it enormously interesting that this approach [that the law is what the sovereign commands] to finding a replacement for a transcendental source of values involves, in effect, a redirection of metaphorical energy: to find a human equivalent for God, there is a focus not on God’s goodness, but on his Power. It makes sense.”
Arthur Allen Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” Duke Law Journal Vol. 1979 #6
In my latest National Post column I say the Prime Minister isn't being inconsistent or confused about allegedly groping a reporter 18 years ago; he's consistently denying the existence of truth.
"To grant that there is a supreme intelligence who rules the world and has established laws to regulate the actions of his creatures; and still to assert that man, in a state of nature, may be considered as perfectly free from all restraints of law and government, appears to a common understanding altogether irreconcilable. Good and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very dissimilar theory. They have supposed that the deity, from the relations we stand in to himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is indispensably obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever. This is what is called the law of nature....Upon this law depend the natural rights of mankind."
Alexander Hamilton, "Founders' Quote Daily" November 23, 2005 from Federalist.com.