“in a world without God, there is not room enough for a man.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Joyce Little in an interview in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 2 #7 (June 1999)
In my latest National Post column I say John Le Carré’s novels were morally rotten and dangerous in practice.
“We must take human nature as we find it. Perfection falls not to the share of mortals.”
George Washington to John Jay August 8, 1786, in W.B. Allen Washington, George. A Collection.
“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