Sense and Non Sense

"Leadership is stewardship, not ownership." Rick Warren, Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency.

“The displacement of the idea that facts and evidence matter by the idea that everything boils down to subjective interests and perspectives is -- second only to American political campaigns -- the most prominent and pernicious manifestation of anti-intellectualism in our time.”

Larry Laudan, Science and Relativism (1990)

"The question is no longer as Dostoevski put it: 'Can civilized men believe?' Rather: Can unbelieving men be civilized?" Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966)

"If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free." P.J. O'Rourke

"Access to a waiting list is not access to health care." Canadian Supreme court, Wall Street Journal, Aug.14, 2005

"If reproduction as such is limited and the number of births decreased, then the natural struggle for existence, which only allows the strongest and healthiest to survive, will be replaced by the obvious desire to save at any cost even the weakest and sickest; thereby a progeny is produced, which must become ever more miserable, the longer this mocking of nature and its will persists. . . . A stronger race will supplant the weaker, since the drive for life in its final form will decimate every ridiculous fetter of the so-called humaneness of individuals, in order to make place for the humaneness of nature, which destroys the weak to make place for the strong." Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

"The philosophy that fueled German militarism and Hitlerism is taught as fact in every American public school, with no disagreement allowed." Phillip Johnson

Freedom uncoupled from truth, John Paul taught, leads to chaos and thence to new forms of tyranny. For, in the face of chaos (or fear), raw power will inexorably replace persuasion, compromise, and agreement as the coin of the political realm. The false humanism of freedom misconstrued as "I did it my way" inevitably leads to freedom's decay, and then to freedom's self-cannibalization. This [council] was not the soured warning of an antimodern scold; this was the sage counsel of a man who had given his life to freedom's cause from 1939 on. Geroge Weigel, Mourning and Remembrance, Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2005

"Democracy in America is still a work in progress, but even with its flaws, this unique American experience provides a shining beacon to peoples who still suffer in places where ethnic difference is a license to kill." Condoleezza Rice

“Why should the right wing be allowed to monopolize the intellectual high ground?” A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies,
Alan D. Sokal,

"We anchor the debate of changing diasporic (transnational) identities to Canada, but, meanwhile, we question space, place, and location as geopolitical manifestations, historical events and metaphorical imagined communities. The boundaries of homes are often remembered as sites of historicized struggles; in addition nuanced identities present new possibilities for articulating anti‑racist, post‑colonial identities or for critiquing the limits of modernity ....In this conference we seek to explore the hybridity encoded in "memory" and remembering, and its expression and representation in literature, film, music, personal narratives and life writing. We invite papers that seek to move the concept of Diasporas further, with particular reference to gender and class." The York University Centre for Feminist Research call for papers for an October 2003 conference "Diaspora, Memory, and Silence: Who Calls Canada Home?" Quoted in Academic Questions, Vol 16, page 35.

"The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble across a sample [that] supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it representative of a whole class." Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (1929)

"It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf." Walter Lippman

"We must be lucid–there are in France some behaviors which cannot be tolerated. There are without any doubt forces in France which are seeking to destabilize the republic, and it is time for the republic to act." Bernard Stasi supporting France's hijab ban

"The nation that has no absolutes except its commitment to nonabsolutes will have no chance against a nation that stands for absolutes-however terrible those absolutes. The civilization with a lie at its center-the creed that all religions and cultures are equally valuable-will collapse before the civilization that insists it is superior." Andree Sue

{Campaign Reform} laws do contain a notable exception. Newspaper owners may spend as much money as they wish publishing arguments in support of candidates with whom they “coordinate.” This solitary exemption from restrictions on free speech is, of course, no mistake: The dominant newspapers in America are liberal, and the 1974 law was passed by a Democratic Congress. Thomas G. West, The Liberal Assault on Freedom of Speech, Imprimis, January 2004

“Our massive strategy was to use the Fairness Doctrine to challenge and harass right-wing broadcasters and hope that the challenges would be so costly to them that they would be inhibited and decide it was too expensive to continue.” Bill Ruder, Assistant Secretary of Commerce, Kennedy Administration

"But tolerance is a different (and less profound) concept than the right to religious liberty. Tolerance may arise merely from a temporary lack of power to enforce conformity; it does not by itself invoke a natural right. The concept of religious liberty, on the other hand, depends upon a particular conception of God, a particular conception of the human person, and a particular conception of liberty." Michael Novak, The Ten Commandments Controversy, Imprimis, December 2003

"This was the face of American prosperity at the end of the twentieth century–racially tolerant, environmentally conscious and determined to wall itself off from the low-paid countrymen who cut its grass, and wait on its table and look after its children." George Packer, The Blood of Liberals, 2000

"The concept of 'children's rights' implies an official orthodoxy, with public agencies determining that certain beliefs are true and others false and enforcing that distinction in the name of freedom." James Hitchcock, The Enemies of Religious Liberty, First Things, February 2004, page 26

"'What is truth?' said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer." Francis Bacon, Essays Of Truth.

"Truth is truth to the end of reckoning." William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure.

"Man has been eating God's oats for a thousand years. It's not the place of an eight-year-old boy to change that tradition." Reverend Maclean, in A River Runs Through It.

“Because they are underfunded, state institutions have become too weakened to incorporate the successful strategies of for-profit institutions.” Jack B. Jewett, Trusteeship, Jan/Feb 2003, page 7

“Life, What a Beautiful Choice.” Ad, 1994, De Moss Foundation

“Choice, What a Beautiful Life.” Ad, 1994, NARAL, Pro-Choice America

"The right to life does not come from government; it comes from the Creator of life." George W. Bush, 2004

"Life begins with the mother's decision." Wesley Clark, 2004, in World Magazine

“Rhetorical man is trained not to discover reality but to manipulate it. Reality is what is accepted as reality, what is useful." Richard A. Lanham, 1976. The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.

“…the language of postmodernism is anything but a morally neutral tool that people of any persuasion might pick up and use to some anointed or appointed end. Instead, that vocabulary commits its user to a very specific vision of the self, truth, and the ethical life-a vision fundamentally at odds with the most basic affirmations of the Christian creeds…. The rhetoric of postmodern pragmatism creates a moral universe in which the self that would use language to ‘help get us what we want’ (Rorty) discovers itself brought into bondage by the very tool it sought to master.”… The language of postmodern pragmatics can imagine no goal for human striving beyond that of Rieff's ‘manipulatable sense of well-being.’ To appropriate its images is to accept its vision of life as a process with no goal beyond that of perpetuating the process itself and making it as pleasurable as possible…. What is ultimately at stake in the debate over the vocabulary of postmodernism is our vision of truth and moral order. The postmodern vocabulary, as we have seen, assumes a naturalistic view of the created order and a merely preferential basis for the ethical life…. Whatever tool you choose to use to enhance your own well-being does not matter; only your freedom in choosing does.” Roger Lundin, The Ultimately Liberal Condition, First Things 52 (April 1995): 22-27

"....we left together to escape a tyranny and end up shootin at each other in the land of the free… imagine that." Irish Union Soldier, Gods and Generals

"Which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of any outward objects. For summer being done, all things stand upon them with a weather-beaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hue."  William Bradford, Plymouth, 1620

"...the problem of the school and the university is the most critical problem  affecting Western civilization today...at the heart of the crisis in Western  civilization lies the state of the mind and the spirit of the  university...responsible Christians face two tasks---that of saving the soul and  that of saving the mind."  ---Charles Malik (former United Nations Secretary General), quoted by Vishal Mangalwadi

"the university is no longer characterized by debate. The metaphor of a "marketplace of ideas" seems more appropriate [A]rguments depend on intellectual constraints, which now seem lacking. Our post-secular situation is governed by fashion rather than argument, responding to boredom and restlessness. So our narrative leads to a student generation that thinks that its views should get as much respect as anybody’s, at least after graduation." C. John Sommerville, Secularism at Bay, First Things, 134 (June/July 2003): 11-13.

The chameleon charms with wizardry

to escape his humble lizardry,

blending in with vain show blizzardry,

Chameleon is confused.

The peacock moves with pageantry,

unfolding feathered tapestry,

to hide would be disastery,

Peacock is convinced.

And which will dress our history

bold plumes or image-shiftery?

Word, sacrament, and mystery,

or blending in, confused?

         Richard C. Lambert, Church Clothes

“By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for chaos.”  T. S. Elliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society,” Cambridge Lecture Series, 1939

“The terrorists speak insanely of deep things. The antiterrorists had better speak sanely of equally deep things.”  Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism

"How can liberal ideas be defended while we call for deep speech, if liberalism in practice means that we remain mute in public about deep things?"  Ken Myers, 2003

"Vanity, vanity. Some movements exhaust themselves only after generations of misspent power. At the moment when its march through the institutions seems complete, this one {humanism} is already dead. The next century will tell us how far a corpse can walk."   Jay Budziszewski, The Humanist Manifesto First Things March, 2000,42-43.

"What [the Springer campaign] tells me is that Democrats apparently have no moral disqualification clause anymore.  It tells me that candidates such as Springer and Larry Flynt, the porn king running for governor in California, are the Exxon Valdez oil slick that is washing up on the beach from the wrecked Supertanker Clinton." "God is not silly putty."  Peter Bronson, Cincinnati Enquirer, Aug. 9, 2003

"God is not silly putty."  Peter Bronson, Cincinnati Enquirer, Aug. 10, 2003

"I think what profess to be realistic stories for children are far more likely to deceive them. I never expected the real world to be like the fairy tales. I think that I did expect school to be like the school stories… This distinction holds for adult reading too. The dangerous fantasy is always superficially realistic. The real victim of wishful reverie does not batten on the Odyssey, The Tempest, or The Worm Ouroboros: he (or she) prefers stories about millionaires, irresistible beauties, posh hotels, palm beaches and bedroom scenes, things that really might happen, that ought to happen, that would have happened if the reader had had a fair chance. For, as I say, there are two kinds of longing. The one is ... a spiritual exercise, and the other is a disease."   C. S. Lewis, "On Three Ways of Writing for Children" in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories

Then, welcome each rebuff
That turns earth’s smoothness rough,
Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand but go! 
Be our joys three-parts pain!
Strive, and hold cheap the strain;
Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe! Robert Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra

"Reason is the natural organ of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning." C. S. Lewis  "Bluspells and Flalansephers" in Selected Literary Essays.

"For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surely contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent”      G.K Chesterton

"Theories that gain acceptance in artificially constrained competitions can claim to be neither most probably true nor most empirically adequate."  Stephen C. Meyer

"We took risks. We knew we took them. Things have come out against us. We have no cause for complaint."  --Scott, found in his diary after the party froze in Antarctica

"The only way to have good ideas is to have a lot of ideas." L. Pauling (?)

"Actors are terrified to speak out on political issues.”  Alec Baldwin, actor

"The American republic will survive until Congress discovers it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”  Alexis deTocqueville

"A book is the ax with which you break the frozen seas within."  Franz Kafka

"A lot of our cultural disorder is because we have an inadequate view of the meaning of the human."  Ken Myers

"It's not denial... I'm just very selective about the reality accept." Calvin, "Calvin & Hobbes"

The bill of rights went too far.  They should have stopped with  "Congress shall make no law." - Seen at http://www.keepandbeararms.com/

"Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality the cost becomes prohibitive."   William F. Buckley, Jr.

"Naturalism deconstructs the mind."   Philip Johnson

"In [concentration camps] we see evil's final result;   but it is conceived and ordered . . . in clean . . . warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars . .. who do not need to raise their voices."  C. S. Lewis

In the world of political correctness, of course, conclusions need not follow logically from evidence." PC at the NRC , National Association of Scholars

"Let’s roll."  Todd Beamer, 9/11/01

[The atmosphere at the New Yorker in the 1980s] was the crazed cult of contemporaneity, the insistent, relentless outer-directedness of an editor who saw what was hot as always and everywhere preferable to what is true." Some Like It Hot: Tina Brown was the Bill Clinton of Journalism , Andrew Sullivan, Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2002.

"[The falsification of data by the Fish and Wildlife Service] shows how the agencies succumbed to a Clinton-era culture that puts ideology ahead of science. It demonstrates the undue influence environmental groups hold over the departments. It also shows how vaguely written laws like the Endangered Species Act can be used to further political agendas, even in the complete absence of hard science."    The Missing Lynx, Kimberley A. Strassel, Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2002.

"Despite the constant emphasis upon 'the dignity of man' in our own liberal culture, its predominant naturalistic bias frequently results in views of human nature in which the dignity of man is not very clear." Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

"[America] succeeded more obviously than any other nation in making life 'comfortable,[but we] "tried too simply to make sense out of life, [by] striving for harmonies between man and nature, and man and society, and man and his ultimate destiny, which have provisional but no ultimate validity." Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History

"Western nations of Europe immeasurably surpass their former savage progenitors and stand at the summit of civilization. . . . Looking to future generations there is no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger, becoming perhaps fixed by inheritance . . . [so that] virtue will be triumphant. . . . American aborigines, Negroes, and Europeans differ as much from each other in mind as any three races that can be named. . . .The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races.  At the same time the anthropomorphous apes . . . will no doubt be exterminated.    The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope . . . the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla."   Charles Darwin,    The Descent of Man. Quoted by Benjamin Wiker,  "Darwin and the Descent of Morality," First Things , Nov. 11, 2001, page 10

"The poorer areas, particularly in the South . . . are producing alarmingly more than their share of future generations."     [Birth control] would ease the financial load of caring for, with public funds . . . children destined to become a burden to themselves, to their family, and ultimately to the nation."    Margaret Sanger (Founder of Planned Parenthood) and Clarence Gamble, Birth Control and the Negro , 1939.  Quoted in Wall Street Journal, May 5, 1997.

"From the Soviet gulag to the Nazi concentration camps and the killing fields of Cambodia, history teaches that granting the state legal authority to kill innocent individuals has dreadful consequences. Calling it "termination of life on request" does not change its moral repugnance."  Dutch Courage , Pete DuPont

"Why can't we become happy by imitating the animals?" Wendy Shalit, Modesty Revisited , Imprimis, 30, #3, March 2001.

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Voltaire

"You cannot possibly know what is wrong with the world unless you have some idea of what is right."    G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World? (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1910) p. 17.

"Truth, of course, must be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves."  G. K. Chesterton

"Words without thoughts never to heaven go."    Shakespeare, Hamlet

"Unfortunately, a great deal of academe lives in a cartoon world whose reigning assumption is that behavior has no consequence."    Stephen H. Blach, NAS Update , Vol. 12 No. 1

"The 'myth' of evolution is as vital to modernism as the ancient theories of creation are central to logocentrism," Louis Markos, From Plato to Postmodernism: Understanding the Essence of Literature and the Role of the Author.

"Before Freud, the conscious mind was privileged over the unconscious." Louis Markos, From Plato to Postmodernism: Understanding the Essence of Literature and the Role of the Author.

"The son of these tears cannot perish."  Monica's presbyter (priest) quoted by her son Augustine, Confessions 3:12:21

"I was purified by that, the fountain of my mother's eyes." Augustine, Confessions 5:8:15

"If you're going through hell, keep going."  Winston Churchill

"Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status."  Laurence J. Peter

"You do not have to sit outside in the dark,
If, however, you want to look at the stars,
   You will find that darkness is required.
The stars neither require it nor demand it."
                                          Annie Dillard

"Our present life feels like a real fight--as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulness, are needed to redeem."  William James, The Will to Believe

I had far rather walk, as I do, in daily terror of eternity, than feel that this was only a children's game in which all the contestants would get equally worthless prizes at the end. T. S. Eliot

"If the art of shipbuilding were in the wood, there would be ships by nature"  Aristotle, Physis

"Marry the spirit of the age and you will be a widow in the next generation."  Alistair Begg

"Ideally, kings command us to do what the best of our nature would have us do in any case, but, when they don't, trumping power is held by the light of conscience and not by the holder of the scepter." Daniel N. Robinson's interpretation of Sophocles' Antigone

"Virtue ennobles the blood." Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes

"When you're over the hill, you pick up speed."  Unknown

"Everyman is the son of his own works."  Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes

"Since the collapse of communism, environmentalism has become the refuge of Marxism."  Rush Limbaugh

"For what a man would rather be true, he more readily believes."  Francis Bacon

"Nature, to be controlled, must be obeyed."  Francis Bacon, Novum Organum , 1620

"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand." -Josh Billings

"These were days that counted for years in the aging of master and men." Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon, describing Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.

"Individualism is the snake in every socialist paradise."  Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Napoleon.

"Maybe the lives of the meritocrats are so crammed because the stakes are so small. All this ambition and aspiration is looking for new tests to ace, new clubs to be president of, new services to perform, but finding that none of these challenges is the ultimate challenge, and none of the rewards is the ultimate reward."  The Organization Kid , Atlantic Monthly, April 2001, page 40-54

"Are they really going to tie up the Senate on behalf of the snail darter or tort lawyers?" The Left: 100 Days In the Wilderness, Robert L. Bartley, Wall Street Journal , April 30, 2001

"The child should not do anything until he comes to the opinion--his own opinion--that it should be done."  A. S. Neill, 1960, author of Summerhill.

"In a rich environment young children can lean a great deal by themselves and most often their own choices reflect their needs."  from The New Republic, 1967

"I don't like Monday's.  This livens up the day."  Brenda Spencer,  1979, 16 yr. old student, after killing two and wounding nine in a California elementary school.

"Education implies teaching.  Teaching implies knowledge.  Knowledge is truth.  Truth is the same everywhere."  Robert Maynard Hutchins

"To spare the mom is, surely, to spoil the child." -- A Mother's Love , Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal , April 23, 2001

"The term 'humanities' includes, but is not limited to, the study of the following: language, both modern and classical; linguistics; literature; history; jurisprudence; philosophy; archaeology; comparative religion; ethics; the history, criticism, and theory of the arts; those aspects of social sciences which have humanistic content and employ humanistic methods; and the study and application of the humanities to the human environment with particular attention to reflecting our diverse heritage, traditions, and history and to the relevance of the humanities to the current conditions of national life."

National Endowment for the Humanities web page in the Clinton era

"Strange, that an era so pleased with its superficially freewheeling and antinomian qualities is actually so distrustful of the literary imagination, so intent upon making its productions conform to preordained criteria."  Wilfred M. McClay, Defining the Humanities Up , First Things, January, 2001, p. 9

"Teaching that man is nothing but a kind of biological machine makes it possible for us to "hide among the animals" and not answer for our conduct." H. O. J. Brown, Quo Vadis, Homo ,  The Religion and Society Report, March 2001.

"Human reason alone, unfounded on a divine cause makes survival the only ethic, but it never answers when, why , or who." Ravi Zacharias

"Humankind is a bubble of consciousness floating on an ocean of nothingness until the bubble pops." Jean-Paul Sartre

"L'homme n'est qu'une passion inutile"  Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

"Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. . .. The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency."  Aldous Huxley, 1949 Letter, Quoted by Jeffrey Meyer, Orwell:Wintry Conscience of a Generation.

"When a man gives his wealth to his children, he gives part to each.  When a woman give her love to her children she gives all of it to each of them."  Unknown

"The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson in humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in man's total striving to control society--a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but may make him destroy a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals."  Friedrich Heyek

"Each age has its own characteristic depravity. Ours is perhaps not pleasure or indulgence or sensuality, but rather a dissolute pantheistic contempt for the individual man. In the midst of all of our exultation over the achievements of the age . . .there sounds a note of poorly conceived contempt for the individual man; in the midst of the self-importance of the contemporary generation there is revealed a sense of despair over being human. Everything must attach itself so as to be a part of some movement; men are determined to lose themselves in the totality of things, in world-history, fascinated and deceived by a magic witchery; no one wants to be an individual human being."  Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 317.

"Rome and the Atheist have gained:
These two shall fight it out--these two;
Protestantism being retained
for base of operations sly
   by Atheism."
Herman Melville, 1876

"The militants talk about tolerance and practice intolerance.  They talk about diversity and work to impose uniformity.  They talk about democracy and represent no one but the alienated few.  And the talk about peace and invite violence."  William Donahue, Quoted in First Things , March 2001, p.80

"If you believe academic jargon, after all, we've just completed two thousand years of the 'Common Era'--which apparently took over when the Uncommon Era ran out of gas midway through the reign of Caesar Augustus"  Ross G. Southat, Harvard Crimson, Dec. 11, 2000.

"How can a book called "How the Mind Works" evade the responsibility of explaining where this sentence comes from?" Steven Pinker,  How the Mind Works.

"Why are there things that exist rather than nothing at all?" Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics

"The antifat movement was founded on the Puritan notion that something bad had to have an evil cause, and you got a heart attack because you did something wrong, which was eating too much of a bad thing, rather than not having enough of a good thing."  John Powles, quoted in Science 291 , 2543 (2001).  See if you can find this concept in Puritan Literature.

"I think that I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so."..'You have four-hundred years of acquisitive instinct in your blood and you just don't understand how a country might not want to acquire land somewhere if they can get it." . . . "I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige , he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace."  Franklin Roosevelt, Letters to Winston Churchill , 1943, quoted by Paul Johnson, Modern Times , p 433.

"Averell [Harriman] is right.  We can't do business with Stalin, He has broken every one of the promises made a Yalta."  March, 1945, Johnson, page 436.

"No one who was not there will ever understand how fatalistically we [servicemen] viewed the invasion of Japan.  It had to be done and would be.  But each of us felt that survival was unlikely. . .I did want what was left of life.  The bomb gave it to me in my way of reckoning. . .I was grateful and unashamed.  In after years on the faculty of liberal universities, where it was an article of faith that dropping the bombs was a crime against mankind and another instance of American racism, I had to bite my tongue to keep silence. For to have said how grateful I was for the bombs would have marked me as a fascist, the kind of fascist I had spent nearly five years fighting."  Alvin Kernan, Crossing the Line:  The Odyssey of a World War II Bluejacket

"We were supermen, floating above history and precedent, the natural rulers of the universe. . . . The law did not apply to us."  Ben Stein describing the Yale Law School environment of Bill and Hillary Clinton

"The history of modern times is in great part the history of how [the vacuum caused by collapse of the religious impulse] had been filled. Nietzsche rightly perceived that the most likely candidate would be what he called the 'Will to Power', which offered a far more comprehensive and in the end more plausible explanation of human behaviour than either Marx or Freud. In place of religious belief, there would be secular ideology. Those who had once filled the ranks of the totalitarian clergy would become totalitarian politicians. And, above all, the Will to Power would produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by any religious sanctions whatever, and with an unappeasable appetite for controlling mankind. The end of the old order, with an unguided world adrift in a relativistic universe, was a summons to such gangsterstatesmen to emerge."  Paul Johnson, Modern Times, Ch. 1.

"Funeral by funeral, theory advances."  Paul Samulson

"Scientists investigate that which already is; engineers create that which has never been." --Albert Einstein

"In public schools we strain out the gnat of graduation prayers and swallow the camel of quasi-secular religion in the curriculum." Ralph Gillman, First Things, October 2000, p. 11

Theology teaches us what ends are desirable and what means are lawful, while Politics teaches what means are effective."  C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock

"Vote early and vote often."  Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, Father of Bill Daley, Al Gore's Florida Campaign Chairman.

"Insects as a group have achieved something that has eluded humans, sustainable development. Insects are the primary consumers of plants, yet they do not merely exploit plants, they also pollinate them, thereby ensuring the plant's reproduction. Humans have yet to strike such a balance between use and conservation of nature. Spiders, in comparison, are a lesser group. . .Most survive by feeding on insects, using venom to kill their prey."   U.  S. Postal Service, Commemorative series on spiders and insects.

"Concerning meta narratives, all this meta, meta, meta talk benefits the chattering classes."  J. Budziszewski

"What will bring this [labor] government down is its arrogant contempt for real people"  William Hague, British Conservative Party Leader

"The vice president [Al Gore] lies reflexively, promiscuously, even pathologically. He lies on matters large and small, significant and trivial, when he "needs" to and when he doesn't, on matters public and private, about his opponents and his family. When asked to come up with an explanation for Mr. Gore's "misstatements," Art Torres, chairman of the California Democratic Party, said, "I have no idea. I'm not a psychiatrist." A Lifetime of Lies , William J Bennett, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 11, 2000

"We forbid any course that says we restrict free speech"  Kathleen Dixon, Director of Women's Studies, Bowling Green State University

"The only thing the party of Franklin Roosevelt has to offer is fear itself."  George W. Bush

"even when we catch the papers in distortion . . . we still come back to them for more. We know it is insubstantial fare, like enchanted food, but we still need that daily fix."  John Sommerville in How the News Makes Us Dumb.

"[Joe Lieberman] is strict and unbending when it comes to kosher catering or avoiding automobiles on the Sabbath, but infinitely flexible concerning respect for human life and other tormenting moral issues." Michael Medved, VP Debate

"If you don't want to use the army, I should like to borrow it for a while.  Yours respectfully, A. Lincoln."  Letter to Gen. George McClellan, 1862

"What is the moral basis for confiscating the wealth of a family that has demonstrated financial prudence and giving it to a government that has demonstrated none?" David R. Heid, Monroeville, Pa. Wall Street Journal Letter, June 15, 2000

"We need to reauthorize [the Violence Against Women Act], to provide the better training and resources and sensitivity to police, judges and public officials that will enable them to respond quickly and understand that it is not just some kind of prank."  Hillary Clinton's NYC crime plan.

"Get Real."  Wall Street Journal, June 15

"There is a difference between talking about compassion and actually putting your highest ideals into practice."  Vice President Al Gore, December 2, 1998, Quoted by, Matt Labash (sic), Sanctimonious Slumlord, Weekly Standard, June 19, 2000/Vol 5, Number 38.

"When the media say an issue is "divisive," they mean it divides majority opinion from their opinion."  Don Feder, Weekly Standard, June 19, 2000

"If current policy had been prevalent in the 19th century, the Attorney General would have been filing suits against abolitionists on behalf of slave owners. " Bob Barr, Rigging the Scales of Justice, Imprimis, May, 2000

"Is it offensive? No. I could quibble with the genitalia, but only because it doesn't work artistically. But its much prettier than I expected. Its quite beautiful."  Reverend Barbara Hussan, Episcopal priestess, on viewing Chris Ofili's Virgin Mary covered with elephant dung and pornographic pictures.

"Most of us know, now, that Rousseau was wrong: that man, when you knock his chains off, sets up the death camps. Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us."  Randall Jarrell

"Euclid  alone has looked on beauty bare."
Sonnet , Edna St. Vincent Millay

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun, but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric.
Edna St. Vincent Millay, in Huntsman, What Quarry?

Yet, do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.
Shakespeare, Sonnet XIX

"You will have noticed that most dogs cannot understand pointing . You point to a bit of food on the floor; the dog, instead of looking at the food, sniffs at your finger. A finger is a finger to him and that is all. His world is all fact and no meaning. And in a world when factual realism is dominant we shall find people deliberately inducing upon themselves this doglike mind." C. S. Lewis  "Transposition" in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses

"Consciousness defies naturalistic explanation."  Todd Moody

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." John Donne From "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions" (1623), XVII: Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris - "Now, this bell tolling softly for another, says to me: Thou must die."

"The difference between the reason of man and the instinct of the beast is this--That the beast does but know, but the man knows that he knows." John Donne, Easter Sermon, April 1628.

"The utopia of mans perfect autonomy and the hope of unlimited perfection may be the most efficient instruments of suicide ever to have been invented. Leszek Kolakowski, Modernity on Endless Trial

"Why is it that departures [acts of terrorism] from scriptural ideals in the Muslim world are identified with Islam and similar transgressions in the non-Muslim world stand apart from their religious contexts?" Ralph Braibanti

"Mindless salivating at novelty merely encourages phonies to peddle their inanities to unwarranted Pavlovian acclaim."  John Simon, New York magazine, March 20, 2000.

"You have to put in the coins to open the gates."  Johnny Chung

"We believe that everything is getting better
 despite evidence to the contrary."
Stephen Turner, Creed

"Empirical knowledge of our biological nature will allow us to make optimum choices among the competing criteria of progress."  Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature

"The principles of justice are . . . the principles that free and rational persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality."  John Rawls, A Theory of Justice

"We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without the means to measure our descent." Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

"What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"  Micah 6:8

"What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as the instrument."  C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man.

"One of the strangest disparities of history lies between the sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies and the sense of scarcity felt by the ostensibly richer societies of today."  Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences

"As for school teaching, it is so strenuous that no one should be bound to it for more than ten years."  Martin Luther

"Academic prestige, the emptiest of glories, is a matter of reputation rather than reality;"  J. J. O'Donnell, Augustine the African

"The originality of the 20th century surely lay in its politics. It invented the police state and the command economy, mass mobilization and mass propaganda, mechanized murder and routinized terror breathtaking catalog of criminal and delusional political creativity."  Charles Krauthammer, Cincinnati Enquirer, Jan. 3, 1999.

"But because of the vagaries of history, Americans have spent most of their lives this century in a position of voluntary subordination to their government."  Man and Governance, Wall Street Journal, Dec. 31, 1999

". . .for the repentance from better to worse is a change not permitted to us."  Polycarp to the Roman Proconsul, Martrydom of Polycarp 11:1

"The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson in humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in man's total striving to control society--a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but may make him destroy a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals."   Friedrich Heyek

"Engineering the engineer as well as the engine, we race our train, we know not where."  Leon Kass

"Any language that may be deemed sexist, racist or homophobic, or may be found offensive by any minority group, is prohibited. Use of such language can result in immediate failure of that paper and possible future action." Course Syllabus, Speech Communications, University of Maine

". . .. . .. . .. . .but man, proud man.
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured
His glassy essence like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep."
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

"We the delegates of the people of Virginia . . . do in the name and on the behalf of the people of Virginia, declare and make known, that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the people of the United States, may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression, and that every power not granted thereby remains with them, and at their will. That therefore no right, of any denomination, can be canceled, abridged, restrained or modified by the Congress, by the Senate, or House of Representatives, acting in any capacity, by the President, or any department or officer of the United States, except in those instances where power is given by the Constitution for those purposes."  Virginia General Assembly, 1788

"After 'the war to end war they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris at making a 'peace to end peace.'"  Archibald Wavell, British officer in the Palestine campaign, W.W.I

"For I see a man must either resolve to put out nothing new or to become a slave to defend it."  Isaac Newton, 1677

"Your manuscript is both good and original. However, that which is good is not original, and that which is original is not good."  Samual Johnson

"[Communism is] a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written."  Ronald Reagan, Notre Dame, 1981

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall."  Ronald Reagan

 "Disney is like the dope dealer in the schoolyard, offering free samples of crack to children in order to create future demand for hard-core poison."  Matthew P. Harrington, Letter, Wall Street Journal, Nov. 3, 1999

"We are often unable to tell people what they need to know, because they want to know something else."  Gerorge MacDonald, Lilith, Ch. 7.

"Postmodernism as a philosophical groundwork for politic ultimately is as shifting sand when it comes to having something solid on which to base what we want in society, be it the emancipation of groups within society, the promotion of democracy abroad or encouraging the spread of the human rights culture. This is an issue we need to consider carefully, for few of us hold that the powerful should do what the powerful can do, and fewer of us still would like to live in a world where such attained." Anthony J. Langlois, Postmodernism and a Hurting World

"Through this process over several centuries of destroying universal moral ideals by questioning their scientific objectivity, the supposedly enlightened industrial nations with democratic governments repeatedly face crises of social conflict and violence that they find it hard to oppose." Richard Gelwick, The Calling of Being Human, Polanyia, 1996

"The scientist's urge to ponder new problems and break new paths in seeking to solve them, presents us with the essential restlessness of the human mind, which calls ever again in question any satisfaction that it may have previously achieved."  Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge

"Maturity is the ability to live with ambiguity."  Elisabeth Elliot, Keep a Quit Heart

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." William Butler Yeats

"If you can't convince them, confuse them."  Harry S. Truman

"Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature."  George Bernard Shaw

"A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin." H.L. Mencken

"We all must keep our hatred alive. . .hate that can push a human being beyond his natural limits & make him a cold, violent, selective, & effective killing-machine."  Che Guevara

"You have heard that is was said love your neighbor and hate your enemy, but I tell you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you." Jesus, Matt. 5:43

"If one hundred doctors need to die to save over one million babies a year, I see it as a fair trade."  Alabama Preacher, USA Today, Aug. 16, 1993

"Live in harmony with one another.  Do not repay anyone evil for evil.  Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody.  If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.   Do not take revenge"  Paul of Tarsus, Rom. 12:16-19.

"Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die." Herbert Hoover

"Science has never sought to ally herself with civil power. She has never subjected anyone to mental torment, physical torment, least of all death, for the purpose of promoting her ideas."  John W. Draper

"It does not require many words to speak the truth."  Chief Joseph

"The struggle is my life."  Nelson Mandela

"What luck for rulers that men do not think."  Adolf Hitler

Only actions give life strength; only moderation gives it charm.   Jean Paul Richter

A timid person is frightened before danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterwards.   Jean Paul Richter

"Fair is foul and foul is fair
into the fog and filthy air."
           Macbeth (7th line), William Shakespeare

"We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain and where to submit. He, or she, who does not know to do so understands not the force of reason. There are some who offend against these rules either by affirming everything as demonstrative, from want of knowing what demonstration is, or by doubting everything from want of knowing where to submit, or by submitting to everything from want of knowing where they must judge."    Blaise Pascal

"Nothing will shake a man. . .out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself."  C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

"Adults regress toward adolescence; and adolescents--seeing that--have no desire to become adults.''  Robert Bly, The Sibling Society

Believe what you want. These walls are funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. After long enough, you get so you depend on 'em. That's "institutionalized."     Red "The Shawshank Redemption"

. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . .. . . What is a man,
        If his chief good and market of his time
        Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
        Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
        Looking before and after, gave us not
        That capability and god-like reason
        To fust in us unused.
           William Shakespeare, Hamlet  IV, iv

"Dying ain't much of a livin', boy,"  Josey Wales (Clint Eastwood), in Outlaw Josey Wales

"If God does not exist, man is in consequence forlorn.  For he cannot find anything to depend on either inside or outside himself.  Morals are for us then both unavoidable and impossible."  Jean-Paul Sarte

"I don't know where were going or how we'll get there, but when we get there we'll be there and thats something even if its nothing."  S. D. A. Pearlman

"There is nothing worse than an amputated spirit. . ..for which there is no prosthetic."  Lt. Col. Frank Slade (Al Pacino), The Scent of a Woman

"Humankind is a bubble of consciousness floating on an ocean of nothingness until the bubble pops."
Jean-Paul Sarte

"Plurality is a safeguard against the arrogance and tyranny to which man has the most characteristic proclivity."  John Murray

"What I fear are attempts to separate language or discourse from the real and to do so in the name of freedom."  Thomas Kuhn

"All this new science didn't just happen. It had to be incubated. If the U.S. can preserve the environment that hatches inventions, it can look forward with optimism to the 21st century. Present evidence suggests that the 21st may even outstrip the 20th as a century of science."
George Melloan, America's 'New Economy' Is Technology, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 21, 1999

"Life wouldn't be what it is today if we didn't have oxygen in the atmosphere and in the ocean."
Roger Summons, chief research scientist, Australia Geological Survey Organization

It matters not how straight the gate
How charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul
         Invictus, William Earnest Henley

And work in me to will and do Thy pleasure
Let all within me, peaceful, reconciled,
Tarry content my Well-Beloved's leisure,
At last, at last, even as a weaned child.
         Amy Charmichael, Quoted by Elisabeth Elliot, A Chance to Die, The  Lifeand Legacy of Amy Charmichael

[German biblical critics] ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts: the evidence is their obvious inability to read. . .the lines themselves."  C. S. Lewis,  Christian Reflections

"..a stereotyped image can obliterate a man's own experience." C. S. Lewis, De DecriptioneTemporum (Inaugural Lecture, Cambridge, 1934)

What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

"It is not the remembered but the forgotten past that enslaves us. . ..The unhistorical are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past."  C. S. Lewis, De DecriptioneTemporum (Inaugural Lecture, Cambridge, 1934)

"Unlike other nations, American identity is not based on ethnicity or geography. It's based on a moral proposition. This proposition comes straight from the faded and yellowed document: The Declaration of Independence."               Chuck Colson, Breakpoint, 7/2/99

"Secularism isn't a way of getting on without suppositions, but a way of getting on without admitting to anyone what they are."
J. Budziszewski,    " The Future of the End of Democracy ," First Things, March, 1999.

"Utopianism has been among the most pervasive myths of our age." Charles Colson

"Those ants outnumber us a hundred to one. If they ever figure that out, its the end of our way of life."     Hopper, in A Bug's Life

"The Democratic party is going to take back God this time.."  Elaine Karmack, Al Gore speech writer

"This administration has shown a real genius for pre-empting the best Republicans proposals like the balanced budget.  But this is what successful politicians have always done."  Bob Zelnick, Al Gore Biographer

"The secular project has undone the humanism project."   Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio Journal, Vol. 37, 1999

"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."

Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

  "We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos. Gone is purpose; all that is left is direction. This is the bleakness we have to accept as we peer deeply and dispassionately into the heart of the universe."

Peter Atkins, The Second Law

 "Is there any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche's philosophy seriously and fashioned his life on it? . . . Your Honor, it is hardly fair to hang a nineteen-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university."  Clarence Darrow, defending Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two university students who had murdered a boy for the intellectual experience.

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth

"The boys who did the killing, the famous Trench Coat Mafia, inhaled too deep the ocean in which they swam."

Peggy Noonan, The Culture of Death, Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1999

"Liberal secularists continue to put faith in the doctrine that what is in the human hand is more important than what is in the human heart."

Cal Thomas

 "Because of recent violence in small cities and towns this is a time when Americans are searching for the causes of violence in their society. No one seems to be asking whether pesticides, fertilizers and toxic metals are affecting our young people's mental capacity, emotional balance, and social adjustment."

Peter Montague, Rachel's Environment & Health Weekly, April, 1999

 "I do not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war." William Jefferson Clinton

"That option [of ground troops] is not under consideration . . . that option was removed from consideration."  Al Gore

"I have always said . . . that we have not and will not take any option off the table."    William Jefferson Clinton

"To the best of my knowledge" (he wasn't even under oath) "no one has said anything to me about any espionage which occurred by the Chinese against the labs during my presidency."       William Jefferson Clinton

 "[Mr. Clinton was] fully, fully briefed [on espionage in] past and present administrations."

   Bill Richardson, Secretary of Energy

"Had we faltered, the result would have been a moral and strategic disaster. . . The Kosovars would have become a people without a homeland, living in difficult conditions in some of the poorest countries of Europe. . ."

William Jefferson Clinton, New York Times May 24, 1999

 "We're right back where we were before the bombing, except a million people are gone.  It's a mess."

Senator Rob Portman, R-OH

"[that] Tomahawk missiles have allowed American president to play a video game of death without risk is a very dangerous and corrupting concept."

 Newt Gingrich, GOPAC, May 24, 1999

 "I think it's impossible even for the ACLU to successfully file a lawsuit saying you can't teach the Declaration of Independence. "

   Newt Gingrich, GOPAC, May 24, 1999

"Just because you have the right to say something doesn't mean it's the right thing to say."

Fred Friendly, CBS News, Retired

  "This country has spent about 30 years trying very hard to prove that no one, not even children, should be fettered by anyone else's idea of proper behavior. . .Are we happy yet?"

    Wall Street Journal, April 22, 1999

 "You can't know how you're going to feel when you become a mother.  This is motherhood's greatest joy and darkest secret.  Suddenly, you can't stop thinking about your child."

Danielle Crittenden, What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us

 "Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing."

 Redd Foxx

 "A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence university education."

 G. B. Shaw

"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence."

 H. L. Mencken

"Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the situation."

 Unknown

"A cynic is a person searching for an honest man, with a stolen lantern."

Edgar A. Shoaff

"Part of growing up is learning how to control one's impulses."

Hillary Rodham Clinton introducing William Jefferson Clinton, April 27, 1999

 "Postmodernism, a wayward stepchild of Marxism, is in this sense a generation's realization that it is orphaned."

Lawrence Cahoone, From Modernism to Postmodernism

 "Friedrich Nietzsche's radical critique of metaphysics, the unity of the self, even of truth itself, and his conception of all reality and all values as expressing 'the will to power,' make him the grandfather of postmodernism."

Lawrence Cahoone, From Modernism to Postmodernism

 "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

Judith Butler, University of California at Berkeley. (Quoted in The Wall Street Journal, 2/5/99)

"If an administration may with impunity deliberately create a condition of war anywhere in the world, representative government itself is imperiled."

Harry Summers, Military Historian

"..the Sabbaths are our great cathedrals' and our Holy of Holies is a shrine that neither the Romans nor the Germans were able to burn."

   Abraham Joshua Herschel

"Civilization is easy to undo but difficult to surpass."

Martin E. Marty,