“For it is the nature of the many to be ruled by fear rather than by shame, and to refrain from evil not because of the disgrace but because of the punishments. Living under the sway of their feelings, they pursue their own pleasures and the means of obtaining them, and shun the pains that are their opposites; but of that which is fine and truly pleasurable they have not even a conception, because they have never had a taste of it.”
Aristotle Ethics
“I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.”
Charles Dickens, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail June 20, 2000
“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking the compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give.”
Joan Didion Slouching Toward Bethlehem
“Gentlemen, listen to me slowly.”
One of “Still More Samuel Goldwynners” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #1 (September 2005)
“Like the economist on the desert island who assumes a can opener, the secularist assumes human dignity and…”
Once again I immodestly quote myself, specifically an idea that occurred to me at Centre for Cultural Renewal conference on faith and politics in Montreal in October 2002
“like a walking torture chamber...”
Jack Kerouac On the Road (describing a police officer with all kinds of leather gear, shiny weapons etc.)
“It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck. Every man has had one horrible adventure: as a hidden untimely birth he had not been, as infants that never see the light. Men spoke much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been. But I really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order and number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe’s ship. That there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there were two guns and one axe. It was poignantly urgent that none should be lost; but somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added. The trees and the planets seemed like things saved from the wreck: and when I saw the Matterhorn I was glad that it had not been overlooked in the confusion.”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
“This sort of thing happens because most people, if not all, although they wish to do a fine thing, choose the course that is profitable.”
Aristotle Ethics