“‘Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour’: these were Christian through and through. Nietzsche did not mean this is a compliment. It was not just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God; he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Nietzsche, more radically than many a theologian, had penetrated to the heart of everything that was most shocking about the Christian faith.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [though I have come to believe that Holland, like nearly everyone, misreads Nietzsche as celebrating what he was in fact trying desperately to warn about].

“I fully agree with Leo Tolstoy when he said more or less the following: ‘People say it’s shameful to change one’s convictions. But I say: it’s shameful not to.’”

Vladimir Voinovich The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union

“No wise man will wish to bring more long words into the world.”

G.K. Chesterton “The War of the Gods and Demons” in The Everlasting Man quoted in “Everlasting” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)

“several studies have shown that less than 10 percent of the people who buy a book read past the first chapter.”

Tony Robbins Unlimited Power

“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

“ONE CAN LACK any of the qualities of an organizer – with one exception – and still be accepted and successful. That exception is the art of communication. It does not matter what you know about anything if you cannot communicate to your people. In that event you are not even a failure. You're just not there.”

Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [start of chapter “Communication”].

“If you particularly want it [a post] to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.”

G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy

“’There is no graded scale of essential worth,’ [Martin Luther King Jr.] King had written a year before his assassination. ‘Every human being has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the creator. Every man must be respected because God loves him.’ Every woman too, a feminist might have added. Yet King’s words, while certainly bearing witness to an instinctive strain of patriarchy within Christianity, bore witness as well to why, across the Western world, this was coming to seem a problem. That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely self-evident truth. A Roman would have laughed at it. To campaign against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality, however, was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a common assumption: that everyone possessed an inherent worth. The origins of this principle – as Nietzsche had so contemptuously pointed out – lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World