“How is it that a lame man does not annoy us while a lame mind does? Because a lame man recognizes that we are walking straight, while a lame mind says that it is we who are limping. But for that we should feel sorry rather than angry.”
Blaise Pascal Pensées
“We still have to learn how to live peacefully, not only with our fellow men but also with nature and, above all, with those Higher Powers which have made nature and have made us; for, assuredly, we have not come about by accident and certainly have not made ourselves.”
E.F. Schumacher Small Is Beautiful
“In general terms I think that morality depends upon religion…”
James Fitzjames Stephen in Liberty Equality Fraternity
“Once abolish God, and the government becomes the God.”
G.K. Chesterton in “Christendom in Dublin” quoted by Noah Morey in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #1 (September 2004)
“Her choice [that of the mother/title character in the novel Sophie's Choice] is plainly evil; for the sake of a better result, she has united herself with the sin of the murderer. And in the end the other child dies too. But how could she choose otherwise, if she had no faith in God?”
J. Budziszewski What We Can’t Not Know
“people often ask me, well don’t you have faith in anything? And I always have the same answer, I do have one unshakable [faith], and that is I have an unshakable [faith] in the unreliability of man. I know that no matter what we do, some damn fool will make a mess of it.”
Garrett Hardin, quoted in Julian Simon Hoodwinking the Nation
“The greatest of all Chesterton’s gifts was his charity, and he carried it to a very high point; for he suffered fools gladly."
Fulton J. Sheed in “G.K. Chesterton,” in Sidelights on the Catholic Revival, quoted by James V. Schall in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #2 (Oct.-Nov. 2003)
“Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, ‘I will not hit you if you do not hit me’; there is no trace of such a transaction. There is a trace of both men having said, ‘We must not hit each other in the holy place.’”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy