“Religion may very well be an illusion, as Freud said, but then man himself is that illusion.”
William Barrett The Illusion of Technique
"St. Augustine, asked what he would do if he knew the world would end tomorrow, replied, 'I would go on working in my garden.'"
Florence King in National Review May 1, 1995 p. 92.
In my latest National Post column I ponder the upside-down modern world in which we seek an artificial sense of meaning to help us stay unconscious.
My latest piece in MercatorNet, based on a speech to the Augustine College Summer Conference (and an earlier National Post column and upcoming Dorchester Review article) asks how a society as devoted to "choice" as our own can at the same time so relentlessly restrict choice.
“Here is a simple truth: humanity has been far better to me than I have been to humanity. All this through the gifts of God. And if I talk about this endlessly it is because God and the angels He has sent to protect me merit endless praise and glory.”
Benjamin J. Stein in The American Spectator June 2005
"history is little more than the Newgate calendar of nations"
Herbert Spencer, quoted by Will Durant The Story of Philosophy
“Goodness me! Humans don't go to heaven! No, someone made that up to prevent you all from going nuts!”
Kryten the robot butler in the Red Dwarf episode "Last Day" (as a side note, Kryten firmly believes in a "silicon heaven" for everything from robots to calculators to toasters)
“Once, long ago, a little crazy hypothesis was thrown across a dark sky and left there. And people could never forget it. Religions were built by its light, poets’ minds shone in its brightness, political systems used its warmth to draw men closer together, and science examined it cautiously and ‘proved’ it to be the essence of sanity, the seed of human growth. It may be only a bedtime story that men told themselves in their loneliness; it may be a lie: this sanctity of the human being, this importance of man the individual, this right of the child to grow, but when it is proved so, there will no longer be an earth to witness the lie’s triumph and no men here to mourn the loss of their dream.”
Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream