“We need metaphors of magic and monsters in order to understand the human condition.”

Stephen Donaldson, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail May 25, 2007 [to which I add “Yes, but why?”]

“In their political arrangements, men have no right to put the well-being of the present generation wholly out of the question. Perhaps the only moral trust with any certainty in our hands is the care of our own time. With regard to futurity, we are to treat it like a ward. We are not so to attempt an improvement of his fortune as to put the capital of his estate at risk.”

Edmund Burke An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs

“Only the concept of eternity could explain the ambiguity between a loving God and the Holocaust. For if life does not end with the grave, we should pity the prison guard, not his victim.”

Edward F. Halpin who “was at Buchenwald with Patton’s Third Army”, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things March 2001

“The night was gone. The morning star was shining in the sky. I too had become a completely different person. The student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me. A dark flame had entered into my soul and devoured it.”

Eli Wiesel Night

“If there were no God, there would be no atheists.”

G.K. Chesterton in Where All Roads Lead quoted in Gilbert! magazine January/February 2002

“All purposeful human action is self-interested, in the crucial sense that it aims at goals accepted by the individual, using means evaluated by the individual. Greed or selfishness, by contrast, is a matter of claiming for the self more than is due.”

Paul Heyne “The Concept of Economic Justice in Religious Discussion”

“Adrienne, who was something of an intellectual snob, believed that most people lived their lives on a superficial plane. Most people thought of their lives, if at all, as a series of almost disconnected events, like a tale told by a child: this happened, then this, then this.”

Ed Ruggero 38 North Yankee

“Really skilful people never get out of time, and are always deliberate, and never appear busy.”

Miyamoto Musashi A Book of Five Rings