“I want to go; God take me.”

Dwight Eisenhower to his sons John and David and his wife Mamie at his bedside in a "Famous Last Words" calendar I had in 2003

“tourist: the sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion.”

G.K. Chesterton in “Roman Converts” in Dublin Review January-March 1925, quoted in “Chesternitions” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. VIII #7 (June 2005)

“We certainly are not that class of beings which we vainly think ourselves to be; man, an animal of prey, seems to have rapine and the love of bloodshed implanted in his heart…”

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, Letters of an American Farmer

“I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven’s sake. What’s the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge?”

The heroine in J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, quoted by Edward Tingley in First Things January 2002

“If there were no death, there would probably be no religion. As long as there is death, there will be religion – unless our pop psychologists can make us all insane enough to ‘accept death’ calmly and blandly as something natural, as our friend, as ‘a stage of growth’. That’s like telling a quadriplegic that paralysis is a stage of exercise, or a divorcé that divorce is a stage of marriage. It’s the kind of joke only a moron or a sadist would tell.”

Peter Kreeft Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées Edited, Outlined & Explained

“‘Let there be light!’ said God, and there was light! ‘Let there be blood,’ says man, and there’s a sea!’”

Lord Byron “Don Juan” quoted in Orlo Miller The Donnellys Must Die

“You are not what you think you are; but what you think, you are.”

Norman Vincent Peale, quoted in Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

“No possible complexity which we can give to our picture of the universe can hide us from God… We read in Revelation of Him that sat on the throne ‘from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away.’ It may happen to any of us at any moment. In the twinkling of an eye, in a time to small to be measured, and in any place, all that seems to divide us from God can flee away, vanish, leaving us naked before Him, like the first man, like the only man, as if nothing but He and I existed. And since that contact cannot be avoided for long, and since it means either bliss or horror, the business of life is to learn to like it. That is the first and great commandment.”

C.S. Lewis God in the Dock