“the Doctrine of Evolution has not furnished guidance to the extent I had hoped.”
Herbert Spencer on the question of ethics and morality, quoted in Famous Last Words calendar July 14, 2003
“The Roman republic did not fall before external foes. It had not been permanently crippled or weakened by long wars against powerful neighbours. What, then, were the faults and weaknesses that brought it to disaster? Were they due to defects in Roman political life or to a faulty machinery of government? Where they the result of an unsound economic system which discouraged the production and upset the distribution among all the people of the good things of this world? Was Roman law unjust, producing social discontent and resentment? Or did the trouble spring from some deeper cause, traceable perhaps to some fundamental change in men’s attitude towards life? If so, was it a matter of altered social relationships between one class and another, between rich and poor, between the old families and fashionable society on the one hand and the unknown ‘common man’ on the other, between the free and the slaves or between the Romans and the Italians or the Romans and foreigners? Beyond all these possible sources of weakness was there a failure of old religious and moral beliefs and a decay of old habits that had in the last resort been the true source of the vitality of the State? Such seem to be the main questions that arise as we read about Cicero…”
Introduction in F.R. Cowell Cicero and the Roman Republic
“For Christmas is, as a matter of fact, the standing example of the proposition which I have lately been maintaining; I mean the proposition that without the superhuman we are not human.”
G.K. Chesterton debating newspaper editor Robert Blatchford in December 2003, quoted by Sean P. Dailey in “Tremendous Trifles” in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #3 (December 2003)
“Tomorrow is Christmas! It’s practically here!”
The Grinch in Dr. Seuss How the Grinch Stole Christmas
“Social questions are the vital questions of today; they take the place of religion.”
Beatrice Webb in her diary in 1884, quoted in Gertrude Himmelfarb The De-moralization of Society
In Convivium I say the NAC production of Roch Carrier’s “The Hockey Sweater” is a surprising, delightful and morally intelligent improvement on the original.
“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
Archilochus, a 7th century BC Greek poet, quoted by Paul P. Streeton in Gerald M. Meier and Dudley Seers Pioneers in Development
“One lesson and one lesson only, history may be said to repeat with distinctness [and that is] that the world is build somehow on moral foundations.“
“19th-century historian J.A. Froude” quoted by Pat Buchanan and J. Gordon Muir in R. Emmett, Tyrrell Jr., ed. Orthodoxy: The American Spectator Anniversary Anthology