“This means open war between men, in which everyone is obliged to take sides, either with the dogmatists or with the sceptics, because anyone who imagines he can stay neutral is a sceptic par excellence.”
Blaise Pascal Pensées
“The object of all human life is play. I for one wish we did not have to fritter away time on frivolous things, like lectures and literature, the time we might have given to serious, solid and constructive work like cutting out cardboard figures and pasting colored tinsel upon them.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted by Robert Moore-Jumonville in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #5 (March 2000)
“We cannot begin by forming independently a theory of how God is knowable and then seek to test it out or indeed to actualize it and fill it with material content. How God can be known must be determined from first to last by the way in which He actually is known.”
Thomas Torrance, quoted in John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
“You cannot evade the issue of God, whether you talk about pigs or the binomial theory, you are still talking about Him. Now if Christianity be… a fragment of metaphysical nonsense invented by a few people, then, of course, defending it will simply mean talking that metaphysical nonsense over and over again. But if Christianity should happen to be true – that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe – then defending it may mean talking about anything or everything. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News December 12, 1903 , quoted in Dale Ahlquist and Peter Floriani Chesterton University Student Handbook
“You can pray all you want but eventually David had to pick up a stone and act against Goliath”
A sign a woman was holding at an unidentified protest in an image emailed by a friend without source.
“he looked upon us as a sort of animals, to whose share, by what accident he could not conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use, than by its assistance, to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones, which nature had not given us; that we …had been very successful in multiplying our original wants, and seemed to spend our whole lives in vain endeavours to supply them by our own inventions…”
The narrator’s account of his Houyhnhnm master’s judgement on humans, in Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels
“For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live forever. The very Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against them, in Heaven’s Chancery itself…”
Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution
“I am not severe – I am sweet by nature. But I defend the rigidity principle. God is stronger than human weakness and deviations. God will always have the last word.”
Pope John Paul II, quoted in the Ottawa Citizen April 3, 2005