“There are a great many truths that we can’t help knowing at some level. Even so, we may not be aware of knowing them, we can deny knowing them, and we can pretend to ourselves that we don’t know them.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” May 8, 2023 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/things-i-had-to-learn]
“If the eighteenth century claimed to be the Age of Reason, nobody can deny the claim of the twentieth century to be the Age of Unreason.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly, Nov. 1, 1930, as header quotation on Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)
“They intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.”
“Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), English author” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail Dec. 17, 2010
“One of them [a crook planning to rob a Vegas casino in the Donald Westlake novel What’s The Worst Thing That Could Happen?] says he has a lot of ideas, but Westlake writes: ‘A whole lot of ideas isn’t a plan.… Ideas without a plan is usually just enough boulders to get you into the deep part of the stream, and no way to get back.’”
George F. Will in National Post Dec. 5, 2001 [not clear if it’s his elision or Westlake’s]
“We like to ask ‘If there is a God, why is there any evil?’ Here is a better question: If there isn’t a God, why is there any good?”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” May 8, 2023 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/things-i-had-to-learn]
“As the classical writers knew – Aristotle knew it, Cicero knew it, Thomas Aquinas wrote of it with great insight – the virtues are interconnected. People are confused about this fact because a person who is full of vices might have some admirable qualities. As a man I knew who was sentenced to prison for embezzling put it, ‘You meet some of the nicest people in prison.’ But the interconnection of virtues doesn’t imply that we can’t possess even a particle of virtue unless we possess complete virtue. What it does imply is that there is no such thing as a person who fails in just one virtue. Anything wrong in one moral dimension does damage in the other ones too.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” April 17, 2023 [https://undergroundthomist.org/antipasto]
“by chance, in 1971, I saw a feminist interviewed on the CBC, claiming a ‘right to her own body’ and a ‘right to abortion.’ In law school, I had learned that an unborn child could inherit property and could be the subject of a trust, and suddenly here was someone telling us that the unborn child had no rights and could be disposed of simply because it was inconvenient and unwanted. I was incensed over this injustice. Something had to be done. Shortly afterwards, I founded and became the first president of the Toronto Right to Life Association and was one of the founders of the political arm of the pro-life movement in Canada, Campaign Life Coalition.’”
Gwen Landolt, quoted by Michael Wagner Standing on Guard for Thee: Newly Revised Second Edition
“He took a Nez approach. As in the opposite of Zen.”
One of mine, from November 20, 2005