“in the Bible, God actively intervened in great battles and wars. And sometimes, to the consternation of God’s people, He was helping the other side. The LORD used heathen Babylon to bring divine judgment down upon Judah. Has God changed? Perhaps He has reformed in his old age? What would a 20th century history text look like if it was written by Nehemiah, Isaiah, or Jeremiah? Would Isaiah see God’s hand of judgment being unleashed on Nazi Germany? ... Was the God of the heavens ready to share His glory with the earthbound emperor of Japan?”

David Kitz Psalms Alive!

“the general rule that when people are talking like fools they are thinking like fools.”

A note sent to myself October 23, 2020 on watching a certain Canadian cabinet minister in action

“It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program – on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off – than on any positive task.”

Friedrich Hayek The Road to Serfdom

“A man who shows no resentment at being slapped is overwhelmed with insults and forced into need.”

Blaise Pascal Pensées

“A man is destroyed by the inner conviction of uselessness.”

E.B. Schumacher Small is Beautiful

“a sleeping fool may pass for a wise man.”

One of the minor villains in Sax Rohmer The Trail of Fu Manchu

“Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot/ That it do singe yourself.”

Shakespeare, quoted in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

“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