“Whenever a moral issue is raised, the reflex of many people is to spout, ‘Who is to say what is right or wrong?’ This is the wrong question. The right question isn’t ‘Who is to say?' but 'How can we find out?’”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” July 1, 2024 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/the-moon-is-made-of-cheese]
“At dinner he [Nero Wolfe] started on automation. He has always been anti-machine, and on automation his position was that it would soon make life an absurdity. It was already bad enough; on a cold and windy March day he was eating his evening meal in comfortable warmth, and he had no personal connection whatever with the production of the warmth. The check that paid the oil bill was connected, but he wasn’t. Soon, with automation, no one would have any connection with the processes and phenomena that make it possible to stay alive. We would all be parasites, living not on some other living organisms but on machines, arrived at the ultimate ignominy. I tried to put up a stiff argument, but he knows more words.”
Archie Goodwin’s internal monologue in Rex Stout A Right to Die
“As long as I can look myself in the mirror and know that I am working as hard as I can, doing what I believe is right for the country, that is how I get through, and that is what I believe I am doing.”
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the end of a frenetic and disastrous electoral campaign, quoted in National Post July 4, 2024 [he also said he had a “clear conscience” so the fact that the election was a disaster for him, his party and his nation apparently did nothing to dent the fact that he felt splendid about himself]
“As the psychologists explained, one of the things that makes incompetents incompetent is an inability to recognize the difference between competence and incompetence.”
David Frum in National Post Jan. 22, 2000 [with reference to a study at Cornell finding that those who did worst on a grammar test rated themselves best]
“‘The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.’”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Donald Morrison, ed. Mikhail S. Gorbachev: An Intimate Biography (apparently Gorbachev cited it in a speech).
“Whether in Korea or in Tierra del Fuego, in Alaska or in New Zealand, the cross on which Jesus had been tortured to death came to serve as the most globally recognized symbol of a God that there has ever been…. The man who greeted the news of the Japanese surrender in 1945 by quoting scripture and offering up praise to Christ was not Truman, nor Churchill, nor de Gaulle, but the Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek.”
Author’s “Preface” in Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“Christendom has no more truly Christian quality, even in its degradation, than the power of laughing at itself.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News August 5, 1911, 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)
In my latest Epoch Times column I deplore the tidal wave of linguistic sewage engulfing us from social media to the pages of daily papers as evidence of mental and moral decay.