“Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.”
Max Beerbohm quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #5 (March 2006)
In a speech to the Augustine College Summer Seminar in June (sorry, I’m a bit behind in my video editing) I argue that the calamities of the 20th century derived, fundamentally, from a rejection of the notion of truth.
In my latest Mercatornet piece I argue that Stephen Hawking’s arguments in his last book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, are as unconvincing as they are dreary.
“Nothing brings a better world into being than the stated truth. You’re going to have to pay a price for that, but that’s fine. You’re going to pay the price for every bloody thing you do and don’t do. You don’t get to choose not to pay a price, you get to choose which poison you’re going to take. So if you’re going to stand up for something, stand up for your truth, it’ll shape you.”
Jordan Peterson, quoted by Tim Moen “MY Letter to Young Libertarians” in The Post Millennial September 4, 2018
“Refiners may weave as fine a web of reason as they please, but the experience of all times shows Religion to be the guardian of morals.”
Richard Henry Lee in a letter to James Madison, quoted in Forrest McDonald Novus Ordo Seclorum
“‘All the same,’ said the Scarecrow, ‘I shall ask for brains instead of a heart; for a fool would not know what to do with a heart if he had one.’ ‘I shall take the heart,’ returned the Tin Woodman; ‘for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.’”
L. Frank Baum The Wizard of Oz
“the belief of French poststructuralism, exemplified by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, that the ‘subject’ – the thinking, single agent, the ‘I’ of every sentence, was an illusion: all you had left was language, not mentality… Once there were writers, but now there is only what Foucault derisively called ‘the author function.’”
Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint
"With God dead, there remains only history and power."
“Helen’s Exile” in Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays