“For it is the nature of the many to be ruled by fear rather than by shame, and to refrain from evil not because of the disgrace but because of the punishments. Living under the sway of their feelings, they pursue their own pleasures and the means of obtaining them, and shun the pains that are their opposites; but of that which is fine and truly pleasurable they have not even a conception, because they have never had a taste of it.”
Aristotle Ethics
“Like the economist on the desert island who assumes a can opener, the secularist assumes human dignity and…”
Once again I immodestly quote myself, specifically an idea that occurred to me at Centre for Cultural Renewal conference on faith and politics in Montreal in October 2002
“It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the book-case, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck. Every man has had one horrible adventure: as a hidden untimely birth he had not been, as infants that never see the light. Men spoke much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been. But I really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order and number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe’s ship. That there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there were two guns and one axe. It was poignantly urgent that none should be lost; but somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added. The trees and the planets seemed like things saved from the wreck: and when I saw the Matterhorn I was glad that it had not been overlooked in the confusion.”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
“’People say to me, that it is but a dream to suppose that Christianity should regain the organic power in human society which once it possessed. I cannot help that; I never said it could. I am not a politician; I am proposing no measures, but exposing a fallacy, and resisting a pretence. Let Benthamism reign, if men have no aspirations; but do not tell them to be romantic, and then solace them with glory; do not attempt by philosophy what was once done by religion. The ascendancy of Faith may be impracticable, but the reign of Knowledge is incomprehensible.’”
John Henry Newman, “The Tamworth Reading Room” (1841) quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind
“We are not any of us very nice.”
W.H. Auden, quoted by Rod McDonald in Ottawa Citizen March 20, 2001
“for God, there are no throw-away people”
“Rev. André Drouin, a parish priest at Ste. Anne, a downtown Ottawa church” who worked among others with AIDS patients, quoted in Ottawa Citizen Dec. 1, 2000
“The human psyche and human nature are artful dodgers.”
Sen. Anne Cools in a speech in the Senate March 13, 2001, quoted in Hansard Vol. 139
“Ride on the nightmare, if you prefer such horseflesh; only do not let the nightmare ride on you.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News May 15, 2009, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #6 (4-5/07)