“all my first views were exactly uttered in a riddle that stuck in my brain from boyhood. The question was, ‘What did the first frog say?’ And the answer was, ‘Lord, how you made me jump!’”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
“But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
The king of Brobdingnag in Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels
In my latest National Post column I accuse many critics of Israel, including in the press, of ignoring that the source of the violence is anti-Semitism, and in doing so of being complicit in it.
“in the Bible, God actively intervened in great battles and wars. And sometimes, to the consternation of God’s people, He was helping the other side. The LORD used heathen Babylon to bring divine judgment down upon Judah. Has God changed? Perhaps He has reformed in his old age? What would a 20th century history text look like if it was written by Nehemiah, Isaiah, or Jeremiah? Would Isaiah see God’s hand of judgment being unleashed on Nazi Germany? ... Was the God of the heavens ready to share His glory with the earthbound emperor of Japan?”
David Kitz Psalms Alive!
“A man who shows no resentment at being slapped is overwhelmed with insults and forced into need.”
Blaise Pascal Pensées
“A man is destroyed by the inner conviction of uselessness.”
E.B. Schumacher Small is Beautiful
“If the word of the Lord stands forever, why do so many Christians discount the Old Testament Scriptures? They may be Scriptures, but we discount them. They have been dumped into the half-off bin at the back of our scriptural storehouse. Actually, they’re in the front of the Bible, but for many of us, they’re in that unused, unread portion. Mentally, we have moved them to the back forty. They have become the back forty-four – out of sight and out of mind. But the words of Psalm 119 break into our mind.”
David Kitz Psalms Alive!
“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