In my latest National Post column I argue that the solution to toxic anger in politics, far easier said than done, is neither to cause nor succumb to it.
“It is perhaps not altogether a coincidence that the year 1882, in which Darwin died, found Nietzsche proclaiming that ‘God is dead… and we have killed him.’”
Dan Peterson “What’s the Big Deal about Intelligent Design” in The American Spectator December 2005-January 2006
“We don’t believe in a God any more/ Any more than in fairies or elves,/ Roll ova Jehova we don’ need a prime mova/ We only believe in Ourselves.”
Part of a poem “The Scientist’s Lament” by John Seymour quoted in Joseph Pearce Literary Converts
“Of a sane man there is only one safe definition. He is the man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.”
G.K. Chesterton in Tremendous Trifles
“The moral state of mankind fills me with dismays and horrors.”
Edmund Burke, expressly re his own time, quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind
“It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at Harvard in 1978 (www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978)
“Is there a possibility that the government of nations may fall into the hands of men who teach the most disconsolate of all creeds, that men are but fireflies, and that this all is without a father?”
John Quincy Adams, in the Letters of Publicola, quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind [Kirk added that the specific target was Thomas Paine and that Adams went on that rather than such an outcome “Give us again the gods of the Greeks.”]
“The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News in 1906