“We do not read Aristotle to find out what people used to think, but for guidance on the issues of today.”
Here I quote myself, from October 1996.
“Now that God is dead, however, or at least comatose”
Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic Monthly March 2004
In my latest National Post column I argue that the solution to toxic anger in politics, far easier said than done, is neither to cause nor succumb to it.
“The world is a comedy to those that think; a tragedy to those that feel.”
Horace Walpole, possibly according to Horace Walpole - Wikiquote borrowed from Jean de La Bruyère’s unsourced: “Life is a tragedy for those who feel, and a comedy for those who think”.
“We don’t believe in a God any more/ Any more than in fairies or elves,/ Roll ova Jehova we don’ need a prime mova/ We only believe in Ourselves.”
Part of a poem “The Scientist’s Lament” by John Seymour quoted in Joseph Pearce Literary Converts
“Of a sane man there is only one safe definition. He is the man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.”
G.K. Chesterton in Tremendous Trifles
“The moral state of mankind fills me with dismays and horrors.”
Edmund Burke, expressly re his own time, quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind
“It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard in 1978 (www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978)