Good Quotes, Chapter 1

"THE fact that a chaotic and ill-educated time cannot clearly grasp the truth does not alter the fact that it always will be the truth." ~G.K. Chesterton: 'Illustrated London News,' 3/23/29  

MODERN science and organization are in a sense only too natural. They herd us like the beasts along lines of heredity or tribal doom; they attach man to the earth like a plant instead of liberating him, even like a bird, let alone an angel.

Population control is a policy that basically sees that the solution to poverty is eliminating the poor. The whole message behind it is that some people don’t deserve to be born or to exist, and I find that very offensive actually, even racist. Population control is detrimental in that it creates this environment that is anti-life ... it is extremely offensive that someone in an office in Europe will decide that no more black babies should be born or no more Latin American babies should be born, or that only one baby should be born.

National Sovereignty is a firewall that prevents global conflagration.

“Can he hate it (the world) enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it?” - G.K.Chesterton

"But ethics alone cannot supply its own rational basis. Even Enlightenment ethics, which still holds our states together, is vitally dependent on the ongoing effects of Christianity, which gave it the foundations of its reasonableness and its inner coherence. When this Christian foundation is completely removed, nothing is left to hold it all together. We see this today in the gradual dissolution of marriage as the basic form of mutual relationship between the sexes; one result of this collapse is the debasement of sex to a sort of easily obtainable recreational drug. The intergenerational conflict, the battle between the sexes, and the division between spirit and matter necessarily follow. We are observing the same process of dissolution in relation to human life. When the goal is to reach a sort of agreement that we should abort children suspected of being disabled so as to spare them and others the burden of their existence—what a mockery that is of all who have physical disabilities! Indeed, it says to them that they are only around because science has not yet progressed sufficiently. And so the trend can continue further. The essential thing is this: reason closed in on itself does not remain reasonable, just as the state that tries to become perfect becomes tyrannical. Reason needs revelation in order to be able to function as reason." —Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) From his book "Church, Ecumenism, and Politics".

“We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right. What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong. In these current fashions it is not really a question of the religion allowing us liberty; but (at the best) of the liberty of allowing us a religion. These people merely take the modern mood, with much in it that is amiable and much that is anarchical and much that is merely dull and obvious, and then require any creed to be cut down to fit that mood. But the mood would exist even without the creed. They say they want a religion to be practical, when they would be practical without any religion. They say they want a religion acceptable to science, when they would accept the science even if they did not accept the religion. They say they want a religion like this because they are like this already. They say they want it, when they mean that they could do without it.” —G.K. Chesterton

The modern world needs, above all things else, the restoration of the image of man. Modern politics, from monopolistic capitalism through socialism to communism, is a destruction of the image of man. Capitalism made man a ‘hand’ whose business it was to produce wealth for the employer; communism made man a ‘tool’ without a soul, without freedom, without rights, whose task it was to make money for the state. Communism, from an economic point of view, is rotted capitalism. Freudianism reduced the Divine image of man to a sex organ, which explained his mental processes, his taboos, his religion, his God, and his super-ego. Modern education denied, first, that he had a soul, then, that he had a mind, finally, that he had a consciousness... The surcease from the tragedy can come only from the restoration of the spiritual image of man, as a creature made to the image and likeness of God and destined one day, through the human will in cooperation with God’s grace, to become a child of God and an heir of the Kingdom of Heaven.” —Venerable Fulton J. Sheen

"COURAGE is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide -- or a drill-book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. "He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier, surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry the Christian courage which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage which is a disdain of life." ~G.K. Chesterton: 'Orthodoxy,' Ch. VI. The Paradoxes of Christianity.

"TO train a citizen is to train a critic. The whole point of education is that it should give a man abstract and eternal standards, by which he can judge material and fugitive conditions. If the citizen is to be a reformer, he must start with some ideal which he does not obtain merely by gazing reverently at the unreformed institutions. And if any one asks, as so many are asking: ‘What is the use of my son learning all about ancient Athens and remote China and medieval guilds and monasteries, and all sorts of dead or distant things, when he is going to be a superior scientific plumber in Pimlico?’ the answer is obvious enough. ‘The use of it is that he may have some power of comparison, which will not only prevent him from supposing that Pimlico covers the whole planet, but also enable him, while doing full credit to the beauties and virtues of Pimlico, to point out that, here and there, as revealed by alternative experiments, even Pimlico may conceal somewhere a defect.’" ~G.K. Chesterton: 'All is Grist.'

"THE truth is that all feeble spirits naturally live in the future, because it is featureless; it is a soft job; you can make it what you like. The next age is blank, and I can paint it freshly with my favourite colour. It requires real courage to face the past, because the past is full of facts which cannot be got over; of men certainly wiser than we, and of things done which we could not do. I know I cannot write a poem as good as 'Lycidas.' But it is always easy to say that the particular sort of poetry I can write will be the poetry of the future." ~G.K. Chesterton: 'George Bernard Shaw.'

“Why turn the other cheek? Because hate multiplies like a seed. If one preaches hate and violence to ten men in a row, and tells the first man to strike the second, and the second to strike the third, the hatred will envelop all ten. The only way to stop this hate is for one man (say the fifth in line), to turn his other cheek. Then the hatred ends. It is never passed on. Absorb violence for the sake of the Savior, Who will absorb sin and die for it. The Christian law is that the innocent shall suffer for the guilty.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (Life of Christ)

"Our complex modern society is directed to the creation of mass pleasure rather than individual pleasure. Movies, television, advertising are geared to the masses, and generally to their lowest common denominator. Their aim is to satisfy what men have in common, rather than what they have individually.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (Way to Inner Peace)

“We are in a condition of society where the school has replaced the church in education, and we are coming to a condition where the state will replace the school. Such is always the logic of history; when the family surrenders its rights, the state assumes them as its own. In order to avoid that condition, the new order must integrate in some way religion to education.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (Philosophies at War)

“In order that the world might be made safe for so many conflicting points of view, broad-mindedness was cultivated as the most desirable of all virtues. The man who still believed in truth was often called narrow, while he who cared not to distinguish it from error was praised for his breadth.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (Freedom Under God)

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship.” Alexander Fraser Tyler, “The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic”  

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot  exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will  continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they  can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.  From that moment on, the majority always votes for the  candidates who promise the most benefits from the public  treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed  by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest  civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about  200 years."  -- Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor 1787

Democracy… while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide. --John Adams

"THE Latin Fathers: Ambrose, Augustine, Leo and Gregory, were in a real sense the fathers of Western culture, since it was only in so far as the different peoples of the West were incorporated in the spiritual community of Christendom that they acquired a common culture." ~Christopher Dawson: 'Religion and the Rise of Western Culture.'  

"I TAKE in order the next instance offered: the idea that Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages. Here I did not satisfy myself with reading modern generalisations; I read a little history. And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations. If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: it didn't. It arose in the Mediterranean civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire. The world was swarming with sceptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun, when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is perfectly true that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more extraordinary that the ship came up again: repainted and glittering, with the cross still at the top. This is the amazing thing the religion did: it turned a sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived under the load of waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans, we arose and remembered Rome. If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever re-emerged (and many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag. But the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life of the new. She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them." ~G.K. Chesterton: 'Orthodoxy,' Chap. IX.

WE often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be.
And for my present purpose I specially insist on this abstract independence. If I am to discuss what is wrong, one of the first things that are wrong is this: the deep and silent modern assumption that past things have become impossible. There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, "You can't put the clock back." The simple and obvious answer is "You can." A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed. ~G.K. Chesterton: 'What's Wrong with the World.'

"I do not know whether Martin Luther invented mustard gas, or George Fox manufactured tear-shells, or St. Thomas Aquinas devised a stink-bomb producing suffocation. If wars are the horrid fruits of a thing called Christianity, they are also the horrid fruits of everything called citizenship and democracy and liberty and national independence, and are we to judge all these and condemn them by their fruits? Anyhow such a modern war is much greater than any of the wars that can be referred to religious motives, or even religious epochs. The broad truth about the matter is that wars have become more organised, and more ghastly in the particular period of Materialism." ~G.K. Chesterton: 'Illustrated London News,' July 26, 1930.

“The world in which we live is the battleground of the Church. I believe that we are now living at the end of Christendom. It is the end of Christendom, but not the end of Christianity. What is Christendom? Christendom is the political, economic, moral, social, legal life of a nation as inspired by the gospel ethic. That is finished. Abortion, the breakdown of family life, dishonesty, even the natural virtues upon which the supernatural virtues were based, are being discredited. Christianity is not at the end. But we are at the end of Christendom. And I believe that the sooner we wake up to this fact, the sooner we will be able to solve many of our problems.” —Venerable Fulton J. Sheen

Cuius regio, eius religio is a phrase in Latin translated as "Whose realm, his religion", meaning the religion of the ruler dictated the religion of the ruled (see: jus reformandi = right to reform, right of reformation). The rulers of the German-speaking states and Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, agreed to the principle in the Peace of Augsburg (1555), which ended armed conflict between the Catholic and Protestant forces in the Holy Roman Empire. The principle applied to most of the territories of the Empire, with the exception of the several of the sovereign families and Imperial cities and the Ecclesiastical principalities, whose issues were addressed under separate principles (see Ecclesiastical reservation and Declaratio Ferdinandei).
The principle only extended legitimacy to two religions within the Empire, Catholicism and Lutheranism, leaving out such reformed religions as Calvinism, and such radical religions as Anabaptism; any other practice of worship beyond the two legal forms was expressly forbidden and legally considered a heresy, a crime punishable by death. Although not intended to offer the modern idea of "freedom of conscience," individuals who could not subscribe to the prince's religion were permitted to leave the territory with their possessions.

The Peace of Augsburg (1555) generally, and the principle of cuius regio, eius religio specifically, marked the end of the first wave of organized military action between Protestants and Catholics; however, its limitations did not address the emerging trend toward religious pluralism (co-existence within a single territory) developing throughout the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire.

If the millennials on my street are anything to judge by, most are emotionally stunted 30-year-old boys, raised by women and lacking any concept of manly drive or ambition, living in their mommy’s basement and working sh*t jobs so they can indulge in their only passions, Internet porn and World of Warcraft. And these losers, who in earlier times would be starting families and pouring their productive energies into their careers, are going to be buying homes how? And don’t even get be started on the University of Phoenix no-hopers who come out laden with massive debts and degrees that qualify them to be barristas at best. Something like a third of last years graduating university students are back living at home with mom & dad because they don’t earn enough to make it on their own and the student loan bubble now exceeds $1 trillion dollars. So home ownership for this lost generation will remain a bleak prospect, especially since the Fed cannot and will not allow deflation to occur. I would feel sorry for the millennials, seeing how badly they’ve been screwed over by the boomers, but then again most of them were Obama Zombies not once but twice, so they are getting exactly what they deserve. But some day, if they ever look up from their iCrap and develop a capacity for critical thinking that wasn’t leached out of them by our pubic school system, they are going to be very, very pissed off.

“The refusal to take sides on great moral issues is itself a decision. It is a silent acquiescence to evil. The Tragedy of our time is that those who still believe in honesty lack fire and conviction, while those who believe in dishonesty are full of passionate conviction.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen

Karl Rove: "...when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

"Politicians have to be progressive; that is, they have to live in the
future, because they know they have done nothing but evil in the past."
— G. K. Chesterton, Avowals and Denials, 1935.

Democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where 51% of the people may take away the rights of the other 49%.

Republic: Olson argues that when the benefits of political action (e.g., lobbying) are spread over fewer agents, there is a stronger individual incentive to contribute to that political activity. Narrow groups, especially those who can reward active participation to their group goals, might therefore be able to dominate or distort political process.

A Republic recognizes the inalienable rights of individuals while democracies are only concerned with group wants or needs (the public good).

Madison: "Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths..."

"A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men." Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

"A culture and a nation that cuts itself off from the great ethical and religious forces of its own history commits suicide." —Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI)

"Before we can be cured we must want to be cured. Those who really wish for help will get it; but for many modern people even the wish is difficult." ~CS Lewis Mere Christianity

Terry Eagleton remarks: Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

More crows- less corn. More people- more corn.

COWBOY BEBOP# 23
The television. Doctor Londes, a man who has been appearing frequently on the television recently promoting a religious movement called SCRATCH.
LONDES: What is a physical body? The body is merely an object. It is an existence all too impure to store the gods within us called souls. Now you will remember. The blood stained history! Material desire. Hunger. Sexual drive. Desire to dominate. Desire for fame. As long as there is a body, desires will be born. As long as there is desire, human ego will not disappear. Humans will continue to fight to fulfill their bodies' desires, and it will never end. At this rate, there is no future! Now awaken your soul! Now be rid of that filthy body!
ANCHOR: The members of SCRATCH use the brain wave control device on this new game console to scan their own brain waves and use a program created by their leader, Londes which is said to copy the spirit from brain waves as digital data and upload that spirit data into the universal network. They believe that doing this will make them exist as a soul without a body.
"We are Scratch, The Migrate to Electronics Movement Join us, in the Infinite sea of Electrons."
LONDES: The souls that god has given us, our spirits - our spirits, which found a way to swim through the immense network and live in the infinity of space. Is not the human body a mere shell, a form of existence all too small and weak for consciousness with such vast reach and potential?

"CARLYLE said that men were mostly fools. Christianity, with a surer and more reverent realism, says that they are all fools. This doctrine is sometimes called the doctrine of original sin. It may also be described as the doctrine of the equality of men." ~G.K. Chesterton: "Heretics."

“There are two kinds of ‘atheism’: the atheism of the right, which professes to love God and ignores neighbor; and the atheism of the left, which professes to love neighbor and ignores God.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (Those Mysterious Priests)

"A man who is perpetually thinking of whether this race or that race is strong, of whether this cause or that cause is promising, is the man who will never believe in anything long enough to make it succeed. The opportunist politician is like a man who should abandon billiards because he was beaten at billiards, and abandon golf because he was beaten at golf. There is nothing which is so weak for working purposes as this enormous importance attached to immediate victory. There is nothing that fails like success." ~G.K. Chesterton: "Heretics."

"When a woman's love becomes venal, everything is lost. When it is kept noble, it brings to the world the balm of tenderness and devotion. The level of any civilization is thus the level of its womanhood." Archbishop Fulton Sheen

"The trouble with modern England is not how many or how few people vote. It is that, however many people vote, a small ring of administrators do what they please."

“Representative government has many minor disadvantages, one of them being that it is never representative.”

"I know that most politicians are engaged in trying to imitate the other politicians, which cannot be considered as a school of virtue."

“The modern representative not only does not represent his constituents—he does not even represent himself.”

"THE men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He’s the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It’s terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hung today."

“Politicians have to live in the future, because they know they have done nothing but evil in the past.”