“I have a worldview, of a sort, and a wider concern. But politics begins at home. The immediate business, and the one that one might hope to understand, is not to reform the world or save mankind, but to make decisions relative to Australia’s immediate needs.”
“Politics” in “A Plot Unmasked” in Leonie Kramer, ed., James McAuley: Poetry, essays and personal commentary
“’People say to me, that it is but a dream to suppose that Christianity should regain the organic power in human society which once it possessed. I cannot help that; I never said it could. I am not a politician; I am proposing no measures, but exposing a fallacy, and resisting a pretence. Let Benthamism reign, if men have no aspirations; but do not tell them to be romantic, and then solace them with glory; do not attempt by philosophy what was once done by religion. The ascendancy of Faith may be impracticable, but the reign of Knowledge is incomprehensible.’”
John Henry Newman, “The Tamworth Reading Room” (1841) quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind
“Teach me neither to cry for the moon nor over spilt milk.”
“The late George V had these framed words hanging on the wall of his library in Buckingham Palace” according to Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
“We are not any of us very nice.”
W.H. Auden, quoted by Rod McDonald in Ottawa Citizen March 20, 2001
“I believe… That our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are, but we are responsible for who we become…. I believe… That you should always leave loved ones with loving words. It may be the last time you see them…. I believe… That we are responsible for what we do, no matter how we feel…. I believe… That either you control your attitude, or it controls you…. I believe… That sometimes when I’m angry I have the right to be angry, but that doesn’t give me the right to be cruel.”
Somone emailed this “I believe” document to me as a Power Point presentation around August 2005. It seems to be extant online in various forms with “Author unknown” or words to that effect.
“for God, there are no throw-away people”
“Rev. André Drouin, a parish priest at Ste. Anne, a downtown Ottawa church” who worked among others with AIDS patients, quoted in Ottawa Citizen Dec. 1, 2000
“In 1945... the vaunted thousand-year rule of the Third Reich came to a brutal end. Great cities lay in ruins. Millions were exterminated; millions more were displaced and starving. A demon in human flesh had put the whole apparatus of the modern state to work to eradicate God’s people. The last victim of every murderous demon is its human host, so staying true to Satanic form, in the final days of war, Hitler and his leading Nazi henchman pulled the trigger on their own demise.”
David Kitz Psalms Alive!
“If a rule of the form ‘he who takes the benefit must pay the cost’ is at stake, then solving the problem means spotting cheats. People do this well. The mind is not following abstract reason; it is enforcing a social contract.... Given this view of man – a natural trader, ever concerned with social debts and an uncertain future – it is little wonder that human minds are interested in detecting cheats, not pursuing pure logic, and in sampling frequencies rather than making risky one-off guesses.”
The Economist July 4, 1992 [an article on so-called "Wason tests" some of which people solve far better than others though they are logically equivalent]