“one person with their mind made up can shove a lot of folks aroun!”
Tom Joad in John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath
In my latest National Post column I argue that the strange juxtaposition of wokism and vicarious debauchery in the New York Times is actually a logical and coherent consequence of being “nonjudgemental”… without being a message well-tailored to me.
“Looming behind Kennedy’s report [British surgeon Richard Hartley Kennedy’s 1825 account of suttee] was a horror of idolatry that reached back unbroken through Christian history. Cortez, confronted by racks of skulls and Tenochtitlan, and Boniface, venturing deep into the forests of Saxony, and Origen, scorning the blood-caked altars of Alexandria, had all borne witness to it. The venerable conviction that idols were raised to demons, witness to ‘the extent and power of Satan’s empire’, exerted a firm grip on British evangelicals.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [a conviction he appears to have believed, at least at time of writing, was unreasonable… but was it?]
“You would make a good lawyer.”
A fortune in a fortune cookie I received in 1999; I believe it was meant as a compliment.
“Returning to the problem he identified in The Abolition of Man and De Descriptione Temporum, in the great change from one culture to another, Lewis [in The Discarded Image] suggested that something has been lost. Even as Plato and Aristotle once governed the direction of science, new philosophes of science govern the direction and application of science until ‘now, in some extreme forms of Behaviorism, the subject himself is discounted as merely subjective; we only think that we think. Having eaten up everything else, he eats himself up too. And where we “go from that” is a dark question.’”
Harry Lee Poe The Completion of C.S. Lewis
“The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”
“William Blake, 1757-1827” quoted in Gravitas Vol. I #2 (Summer 1994) without further attribution.
“One of the reasons most people don’t do well in life is because success is usually disguised behind hard work.”
Anthony Robbins Unlimited Power
“‘Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour’: these were Christian through and through. Nietzsche did not mean this is a compliment. It was not just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God; he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Nietzsche, more radically than many a theologian, had penetrated to the heart of everything that was most shocking about the Christian faith.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [though I have come to believe that Holland, like nearly everyone, misreads Nietzsche as celebrating what he was in fact trying desperately to warn about].