“After the gleam of exaggerated hopes, what Kipling called the Gods of the Copybook Headings have come back to croak out their ancient saws, whose only merit is that they happen to be true.”
The Economist December 22, 1990
“Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy.”
C.S. Lewis Surprised by Joy
“‘When the devil makes his offer (always open incidentally) of the kingdoms of the earth, it is the bordellos which glow so alluringly to most of us, not the banks and the counting-houses and the snow-swept corridors of power… Sex is the mysticism of a materialistic society - in the beginning was the Flesh, and the Flesh became Word; with its own mysteries - this is my birth pill; swallow it in remembrance of me! - and its own sacred texts and scriptures - the erotica which fall like black atomic rain on the just and unjust alike, drenching us, stupefying us. To be carnally minded is life!’”
Malcolm Muggeridge, Jesus Rediscovered
“These old wild images [of centaurs and mermaids, noble in their human parts] included a crucial truth. Man is a monster. And he is all the more a monster because one part of him is perfect.”
G.K. Chesterton “Questions of Divorce,” in Alvaro De Silva, ed. Brave New Family Brave New Family: G.K. Chesterton on Men & Women, Children, Sex, Divorce, Marriage & the Family
“In this pathetic and simple-minded view, humans are to be but life-support systems for free-wheeling genitalia.”
William Gairdner The Trouble with Democracy