“The Fourth Gospel does not pretend to be a biography of Jesus; it is a presentation of Christ from the theological point of view, as the divine Logos or Word, creator of the world and redeemer of mankind. It contradicts the synoptic gospels in a hundred details and in its general picture of Christ. The half-Gnostic character of the work, and its emphasis on metaphysical ideas, have led many Christian scholars to doubt that its author was the apostle John. Experience suggests, however, that an old tradition must not be too quickly rejected; our ancestors were not all fools.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“Here is someone who with a great effort is going to say something very silly.”

Terence, quoted in Pascal Pensées

“All this is the result of your imprudence and stupidity.”

A letter from Pope Gregory II to Emperor Leo III in 727 AD excerpted in Brian Tierney, The Crisis of Church & State 1050-1300 [also from my “Don’t mince words, Bones” file]

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the reason Mark Carney can’t pull us back from the left-wing idiocies of Justin Trudeau is that he holds substantially the same views and doesn’t even know it.

In my latest Epoch Times column I say from coast to coast Canada is turning away from trusting the people and abandoning self-government for meddlesome ineffective presumption.

“The general picture of Syria under Roman rule is one of prosperity more continuous than in any other province. Most of the workers were freeman, except in domestic service. The upper classes were Hellenized, the lower remained Oriental; in the same town Greek philosophers rubbed elbows with temple prostitutes and emasculated priests; and even till Hadrian children were now and then offered as sacrifices to the gods.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“Our knowledge of the Lyons persecutions [in or very shortly after 177 AD] comes from a letter of ‘the servants of Christ at Lugdunum and Vienna in Gaul, to the brethren in Asia and Phrygia,’ preserved in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, v, 1. Some exaggeration may have crept into the report.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“Protestants had been insisting on the correctness of their own readings of scripture, their own understandings of God’s purpose, since the time of Luther’s confrontation with Cajetan. Now, in the person of Spinoza, this tradition had begun to cannibalise itself.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World