“It is certainly one of the things that we can’t not know that no one may deliberately take innocent human life. The more particular doctrine of man as the created image of God seems unknown beyond the bible’s sphere of influence; it is not one of the things we can’t not know. Some intuition of the sacredness of human life is universal nonetheless…”
J. Budziszewski What We Can’t Not Know
“Mr Wirt: What do you think is going to happen in the next few years of history, Mr Lewis?”
“Lewis: I have no way of knowing. My primary field is the past. I travel with my back to the engine, and that makes it difficult when you try to steer.”
C.S. Lewis “Cross-Examination” in The Grand Miracle
“Gambling is a tax for people who can’t do math.”
Variously attributed in various forms, sometimes singling out lotteries.
“Innocent Louis [XVI] bears the sins of many generations: he too experiences that man’s tribunal is not in this Earth; that if he had no Higher one, it were not well with him.”
Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution
“Researchers have identified ‘structural’ historical concepts that provide the basis of historical thinking. The Benchmarks project is using this approach, with six distinct but closely interrelated historical thinking concepts. Students should be able to:
* establish historical significance…
* use primary source evidence…
* identify continuity and change…
* analyze cause and consequence…
* take historical perspectives…
* understand the moral dimension of historical interpretations…
Taken together, these tie ‘historical thinking’ to competencies in ‘historical literacy.’”
Excerpted from “Benchmarks of Historical Thinking: Framework for Assessment in Canada, by Peter Seixas, Executive Director of the Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness” in The Beaver April-May 2009
“We live surrounded by mysteries and imagine that by inventing names we explain them.”
W.B. Seabrook, “Goat-Cry, Girl-Cry,” in Chancellor Press Great Ghost Stories
“Belief is favourable to the human mind, were it for nothing else but to furnish it entertainment. An infidel I should think, must frequently suffer from ennui. It was perhaps affectation in Socrates to say, that all he had learned to know was that he knew nothing. But surely it is a mark of wisdom, to be sensible of the limited extent of human knowledge, and to examine with reverence the ways of GOD, nor presumptuously reject any opinion which has been held by the judicious and the learned, because it has been made a cloak for artifice, or had a variety of fictions raised on it, by credulity.”
James Boswell, Esq. The Journal of a Tour To Corsica; & Memoirs of Pascal Paoli
“Trends that have held up over several hundred years are not apt to reverse themselves within the next several weeks.”
John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History