“When the knight came upon the dragon, did he estimate whether the dragon could be overcome in his lifetime? No. He stood up and fought.”
J. Budziszewski in “Underground Thomist” email Feb. 25, 2019
“The future is, of course, an illusion. Nothing has happened there yet.... Among Marshall McLuhan’s many intriguing metaphors, the most paradoxical one is his reference to ‘rearview mirror’ thinking. All of us, he said, are speeding along a highway with our eyes fixed on the rearview mirror… He believed that only a few avantgarde artists (and, of course, himself) were capable of looking through the windshield so that they might tell us where we are going. The irony here is that the windshield is also a rearview mirror of sorts, for whatever future we see is only – can only be – a projection of the past.... Imagined futures are always more about where we have been than where we are going.”
Start of author’s “Introduction” to Neil Postman Building a Bridge to the 18th Century
“There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
Henry David Thoreau, quoted on www.hound-dog-media.com
"We confess to little faults only to persuade ourselves that we have no great ones."
François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, quoted on www.hound-dog-media.com
“the present era, by and large since the end of the First World War, has returned to the practice and theory of radical hedonism.... We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent - people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.”
Erich Fromm To Have and To Be p. xxvii.
“That's what's important, to feel useful in this old world, to hit a lick against what's wrong, or to say a word for what's right even though you get walloped for saying that word. Now I may sound like a Bible beater yelling up a revival at a river crossing camp meeting, but that don't change the truth none. There's right and there's wrong. You got to do one or the other. You do the one and you're living. You do the other and you may be walking around, but you're dead as a beaver hat.”
Davy Crockett (John Wayne) in The Alamo (according to en.wikiquote.org)
“Unlike the case of Philosophy, where no answer to its question is ever possible, there must be an answer to the great question of Political Economy. How – so it first asked – does mankind produce enough goods for the wants of mankind? That has been answered long ago. How can mankind adjust its production so as not to oversatisfy some, undersatisfy others, and break down in the process? That has not been answered.”
Stephen Leacock "What is Left of Adam Smith?" in On the Front Line of Life
“Any small victory in a storm...”
Announcer on ABC Monday Night Football Oct. 17 1988