“the tide had ebbed as well as flowed: the occasional Bishop, caught out by an abrupt reversal of royal policy, had been forced to flee; the occasional king, cut down by a pagan rival, had been ritually dismembered. Nevertheless, by the time of Theodore’s arrival in Canterbury [668 AD], a majority of the Saxon and Anglian elites had tested the Christian god to their satisfaction. Like a sparrow flying swiftly through a hall and out again, into the storms of winter, so the brief life of man had seemed to these lords. ‘For of what went before it or what comes after, we know nothing. Therefore, if these new teachings can inform us more fully, it seems only right that we should follow them.’”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“He [Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a high-performing debauchee] was well versed in Greek as well as Roman literature, was a discriminate collector of art (usually by military means), had the works of Aristotle brought from Athens to Rome as a part of his richest spoils, and found time, between war and revolution, to write his Memoirs for the misguidance of posterity.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“Terminos propriae potestatis egressus in aliam messem perperam mittit falcem suam.”

“*[Ed.: He who wanders outside the boundaries of his own ability wrongly puts his sickle into another’s harvest.]”

2nd of 2 epigrams on the title page of “The Fourth Part of the Institutes” in The Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke Volume II [also expressed by Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callaghan as “A man’s got to know his limitations”].

“it is low-class not to do one’s best...”

Nika Hazelton in National Review December 11, 1995

“Have you heard this line? ‘Now that we know about brain physiology, it’s obvious that there could be no such thing as free will.’ That’s like saying that the circuitry of a cellphone determines the conversations which takes place on it.”

J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” August 26, 2024 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/telephones-and-free-will].

“Francis Bacon's acute methodological dictum: ‘Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.’”

Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition

In my latest Epoch Times column I explore the ongoing fascination with the Catholic Church on the part of people who scorn its teachings.

“Overall, the results showed that incompetence is even worse than it appears to be and forms a sort of holy trinity of cluelessness. The incompetent don’t perform up to speed; don’t recognize their own lack of competence; and don’t even recognize the competence of other people.”

A Guardian summary of the seminal Justin Kruger and David Dunning study Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing ones own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments, quoted by Mike Jenkinson in the Ottawa Sun May 31, 2004