"Knowledge comes by taking things apart. But wisdom comes by putting things together."
John A. Morrison, quoted as an "Apercus du jour” in "Social Studies" in Globe and Mail May 20, 2008
“If ever God is banished from the world so that even His image is eradicated from the human mind, we will cease to be human and become merely very clever animals—and our ultimate fate will be too horrible to contemplate."
Father Karl Rahner, SJ, quoted by Paul Johnson in “The human race: success or failure?” in The New Criterion Vol. 25 (Nov. 2006)
“The main thing is never to act against your conscience, not to put your signature on documents you do not believe in, not to vote for those who you think should not be elected, not to approve decisions, not to applaud, not to pass on lies, not to broadcast them, not to write them, not to put them down on paper, not to pretend … Let your creed be 'Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph, but not through me.'"
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn "Live not by the Lie" quoted by Ian Hunter in National Post August 5, 2008
"We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile."
Hilaire Belloc, quoted in “The Catholic Buckley” in George William Rutler He Spoke to Us, saying they were "written after gazing upon the ruins of Timgad in North Africa, a city destroyed by the Vandals”
"If you put new ideas before the eyes of fools/ They’ll think you foolish and worthless into the bargain"
Medea in Euripedes Medea
"Your sheep’s clothing is slipping."
Eric Ambler, The Intercom Conspiracy, quoted as one of the "Top Ten Detective Fiction Wise Cracks" compiled by "Gramps" in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 2 #6 Issue 15 (April/May 1999)
"Without a higher vision to animate it, the secular conservative’s City on a Hill will have little to distinguish it from the secular liberal’s Upper West Side of New York."
George William Rutler “The Catholic Buckley” in He Spoke to Us
In my latest National Post column I choke on "raw water".