“Terminos propriae potestatis egressus in aliam messem perperam mittit falcem suam.”
“*[Ed.: He who wanders outside the boundaries of his own ability wrongly puts his sickle into another’s harvest.]”
2nd of 2 epigrams on the title page of “The Fourth Part of the Institutes” in The Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke Volume II [also expressed by Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry Callaghan as “A man’s got to know his limitations”].
“it is low-class not to do one’s best...”
Nika Hazelton in National Review December 11, 1995
“Have you heard this line? ‘Now that we know about brain physiology, it’s obvious that there could be no such thing as free will.’ That’s like saying that the circuitry of a cellphone determines the conversations which takes place on it.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” August 26, 2024 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/telephones-and-free-will].
“Francis Bacon's acute methodological dictum: ‘Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion.’”
Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition
In my latest Epoch Times column I explore the ongoing fascination with the Catholic Church on the part of people who scorn its teachings.
“Overall, the results showed that incompetence is even worse than it appears to be and forms a sort of holy trinity of cluelessness. The incompetent don’t perform up to speed; don’t recognize their own lack of competence; and don’t even recognize the competence of other people.”
A Guardian summary of the seminal Justin Kruger and David Dunning study Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing ones own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments, quoted by Mike Jenkinson in the Ottawa Sun May 31, 2004
“There is an important distinction in life, including work life, between things you want to have done and things you want to be doing.”
Another of mine, from Feb. 12, 1988
“Already, by the time that Anselm died in 1109, Latin Christendom had been set upon a course so distinctive that what today we term ‘the West’ is less its heir than its continuation…. Today, at a time of seismic geopolitical realignment, when our values are proving to be not nearly as universal as some of us had assumed them to be, the need to recognize just how culturally contingent they are is more pressing than ever. To live in a western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions. This is no less true for Jews or Muslims than it is for Catholics or Protestants. Two thousand years on from the birth of Christ, it does not require a belief that he rose from the dead to be stamped by the formidable – indeed the inescapable – influence of Christianity. Whether it be the conviction that the workings of conscience are the surest determinants of good law, or that Church and state exist as distinct entities, or that polygamy is unacceptable, its trace elements are to be found everywhere in the West…. The West, increasingly empty though the pews may be, remains firmly moored to its Christian past.”
Author’s “Preface” in Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World