“One of the most enduring truths is that man is a verb; but what human beings can do remains astonishing and frightening.”
Michael Young in National Review Dec. 5, 1994
“Christmas can be commercial and tacky – after all, graduations, weddings and funerals are often commercial and tacky – but it should never be sentimental. Sentimentality is love without sacrifice. The sentimental man sends his wife flowers but never helps with the dishes.”
Fr. Raymond J. DeSouza in National Post Dec. 24, 2002
“It is a pressing problem for a credible theology, second only to the problem of suffering, to give some satisfactory account of why the diversity of religious affirmations should not lead us to the conclusion that they are merely the expression of culturally determined opinions. Kenneth Cragg reminds us that even in the seventeenth century John Bunyan felt the difficulty. In Grace Abounding he wrote, ‘Everyone doth think his own religion rightest, both Jews and Moors and Pagans: and how if our faith, and Christ, and scriptures, should be but a think so too?’ Of course, there is unquestionably a degree of cultural determination in our actual religious beliefs. If I had grown up in Saudi Arabia, rather than in England, it would be foolish to deny that the chances are I would be a Muslim. But the chances are also that I would not have spent most of my life as a theoretical physicist, but that does not mean that science is simply a cultural artefact. We must not commit the genetic fallacy of supposing that origin explains away the content of belief.”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the Charter of Rights and Freedoms doesn’t protect freedom, it protects our right to impose on other people, because it was designed by utilitarians to override natural law and it does.
“It is a strange thing how the pain of seeing the suffering of those we love will sometimes make us add to their suffering by being cross with them. This comes of not having faith enough in God, and shows how necessary this faith is, for when we lose it, we lose even the kindness which alone can soothe the suffering.”
George MacDonald At the Back of the North Wind
“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” not further attributed in Epoch Times email newsletter November 26, 2021.
“No man was ever wise by chance”
LUCIUS ANNAEUS SENECA, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” (not further attributed) in Epoch Times email December 6, 2021
“The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once said that the key insight into any society in any age is had by inquiring into what people didn’t write about; because that is what those people, in that age, simply took for granted.”
William F. Buckley Jr. in National Review January 24, 2000