“I once gave a speech I called ‘Gazing at Stars and Patting Cats.’ Its theme was that in order to live with equanimity and hope, to experience awe, wonder and joy, and to deal with our tragedies, despairs, and sorrows, we humans need to have one hand patting an animal or in the earth, and the other reaching out to the stars, to the universe.”
Margaret Somerville The Ethical Imagination
“If, then, the burden of history can weigh this heavily upon the present and the future, then surely part of the historian’s task is to try to lift that burden: to show that, because most forms of oppression have been constructed, they can be deconstructed; to demonstrate that what is was not always so in the past and therefore need not be so in the future. The historian must be, in this sense, a social critic; for it’s by means of such criticism that the past liberates even as it oppresses the present and the future – very much as the historian, however paradoxically, simultaneously performs both acts upon the past itself.”
John Lewis Gaddis The Landscape of History
“The market is ‘heartless.’ So are clocks and yardsticks. Saying that economic problems are the result of the free market’s failure is like gaining twenty pounds and calling the bathroom scale a bum.”
P.J. O’Rourke Eat the Rich
“The measure of a man’s character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out.” Thomas Babington
“Allah will smile on you.” “More likely he will laugh at me.” Exchange between a merchant and Sindbad right after they make a deal, in The Golden Voyage of Sindbad
“It used to be that your religion was, so to speak, part of the core curriculum of your life; now everything, including religion, is an elective.” Richard John Neuhaus in First Things October 2000
“They reached the kitchen, which had about half the number of floorboards required by popular prejudice.” Susan B. Kelly, Hope Against Hope
“The problem is not that there are problems. The problem is expecting otherwise and thinking that having problems is a problem.” Theodore Rubin