“We live under the shadow of a gigantic question mark. Who are we? Where do we come from? Whither are we bound?”
Hendrick Van Loon The Story of Mankind (the beginning)
“let them choose rather to be corrected by the wise than to be lauded by the foolish.”
St. Augustine City of God
“Unmaking the bomb (as I’ve written before) is like trying to un-eat the forbidden fruit. Leaving the Tree of Knowledge alone might have been a better choice, but it’s a bit too late for that. Pretending it never happened isn’t a useful idea. God had good reasons for his dietary restrictions in the Garden of Eden, arbitrary as they may have seemed to his critics, then and since.”
George Jonas in National Post August 8, 2015 (defending the use of nuclear weapons to end World War II; interestingly, Jonas was not a believer)
In my latest National Post column I say the bizarre life of the late fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld reflects the emptiness of postmodernism all too well.
“Frederick Myers describes a conversation with her [George Eliot] in which, ‘taking as her text the words God, Immortality, Duty, she pronounced, with a terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how incredible the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third’…. It is quite normal now for people to go through life without an ultimate object, but to the Victorians it was new and daunting. No wonder so many of them were such odd fish – Kitchener, Rosebery, Salisbury, Dilke, Curzon, Carson, Randolph Churchill, Fisher, Rhodes, Milner. In many cases certitude was replaced by a streak of violence…”
Paul Johnson The Offshore Islanders
“One general description of madness, it seems to us, might be found in the statement that madness is a preference for the symbol over that which it represents.”
G.K. Chesterton, “Lunacy and Letters,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
“Even if it were true that a hundred persons would experience more pleasure from torturing one person than that person would experience pain (in some dreadful utilitarian calculus), such an action would be an abomination. The person is never subordinate to the common good in an instrumental way. Persons are not means but ends, because of the God in Whom they live and Who lives in them.”
Michael Novak, Free Persons and the Common Good
“It is the duty of all men in society, publicly, and at stated seasons, to worship the SUPREME BEING, the great Creator and Preserver of the universe. And no subject shall be hurt, molested, or restrained, in his person, liberty, or estate, for worshipping GOD in the manner most agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience; or for his religious profession or sentiments; provided he doth not disturb the public peace, or obstruct others in their religious worship.”
John Adams in “Thoughts on Government, 1776” quoted by The Federalist Patriot “Founders' Quote Daily” (federalist.com) Nov. 21, 2005