“Four park benches sit on the lawn at Wesley United Church at Main and Graham, offering weary passersby a place to rest. They aren’t chained or locked. One of the slats in the benches bears the inscription: ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ But it’s probably the added inscription on the next slat that is most effective. ‘God is watching.’”
Dave Brown Best of Brown
“Refiners may weave as fine a web of reason as they please, but the experience of all times shows Religion to be the guardian of morals.”
Richard Henry Lee in a letter to James Madison, quoted in Forrest McDonald Novus Ordo Seclorum
"With God dead, there remains only history and power."
“Helen’s Exile” in Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays
"Every right is a divine right."
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News December 20, 1924 quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. VIII #7 (June 2005)
"if there is any permanent element in him [man generally], his conscience in all probability cannot be destroyed, although it can be covered up and disregarded. To tamper with it, therefore, to try to destroy it, is of all conceivable courses of conduct the most dangerous, and may prepare the way to a wakening, a self-assurance, of conscience fearful to think of. But suppose that the fungus theory is the true one. Suppose that man is a mere passing shadow, and nothing else. What is he to say of his conscience? Surely a rational man holding such a theory of his own nature will be bound in consistency to try and to determine the question whether he ought not to prune his conscience just as he cuts his hair and nails. A man who regarded a cold heart and a good digestion as the best possible provision for life would have a great deal to say for his view.”
James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty Equality Fraternity
"If there are commands of God, then there must be rights of man."
G.K. Chesterton in “The Empire of the Insect” in What’s Wrong with the World, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 12 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2009).
“How could man have such utter contempt for man? Because he had reached the point of contempt for God. Only a godless ideology could plan and carry out the extermination of a whole people."
John Paul II at Yad Vashem, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things October 2000
In lecturing to R.A.F. members during World War II “It seemed to me that they did not really believe that we have any reliable knowledge of historic man. But this was often curiously combined with a conviction that we knew a great deal about prehistoric man: doubtless because prehistoric man is labeled ‘science’ (which is reliable) whereas Napoleon or Julius Caesar is labeled as ‘history’ (which is not). Thus a pseudoscientific picture of the ‘caveman’ and a picture of ‘the present’ filled almost the whole of their imaginations; between these, there lay only a shadowy and unimportant region in which the phantasmal shapes of Roman soldiers, stagecoaches, pirates, knights-in-armor, highwaymen, etc., moved in a mist. I had supposed that if my hearers disbelieved the Gospels, they would do so because the Gospels recorded miracles. But my impression is that they disbelieved them simply because they dealt with events that happened a long time ago: that they would be almost as incredulous of the battle of Actium as of the Resurrection – and for the same reason.”
C.S. Lewis, The Grand Miracle