“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

“Human beings are neither souls alone, nor bodies alone, but embodied souls. Since the laws of our bodies are constitutive elements of our being, we don’t diminish ourselves by honoring them – we would alienate ourselves by not honoring them. They aren’t shackles, but real aspects of our embodied personhood – inheritances, not encumbrances; enrichments, not impoverishments; not things to be struggled against, but things to be cherished as gifts.”

J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” April 17, 2023 [https://undergroundthomist.org/antipasto]

“Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little.”

“Epicurus Greek philosopher (341-270 B.C.)” quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail August 6, 2012.

“Man is governed not only by what he thinks but by what he chooses to think about.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News May 11, 1912, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2008).

“How odd it is that the things we do spontaneously are usually bad for us. Doesn’t that suggest that something has gone wrong with our nature? I think so. Please notice that I am asking whether the condition of man’s nature has changed. I am not asking whether our nature itself has changed, for if that had happened, then either the being before the change wasn’t man – or it was, but we aren’t.”

J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” April 17, 2023 [https://undergroundthomist.org/antipasto]

“No one can invent new values or a new morality. What appear to be new ones are merely the results of cherry-picking elements of the ‘old’ morality, exaggerating them, and ignoring all of its other elements. This was [C.S.] Lewis’s great insight.”

J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” May 8, 2023 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/things-i-had-to-learn]