Good Quotes, Chapter 3

“There is in each of us a shadow-self, and a real-self. The shadow-self seeks only its own will and pleasure. The more we keep the sun behind us, the greater the length of the shadow, the less Christ is in our lives. Every pain patiently borne, every blow to self, shapes the real eternal self. It was the Crucifixion of Our Lord that prepared the way for His resurrection and Glory. Our Lord is weaving your heavenly robes for the heavenly nuptials, though you know it not, in moments that seem so loveless. You cannot see entirely God’s Plan for you. The uncharted ocean is before you, as you toss in the narrow cabin of your suffering; but the Divine Pilot is bringing you to port.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen Foundation (Lenten & Easter Inspirations)

“The devil appears as the representative of good. No one does evil for the mere sake of evil. Evil is done for the seeming good that is in it. The devil knows that we are not so depraved that we want to do evil.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (Crossways)

“False economics says that the primary end of business is not consumption, but production. Start with this principle and it follows then that the purpose of a machine is not to supply human needs, but to make profit for its owner. The price then becomes more important than the man who pays the price. It is then only a step to say that the produce of God’s bountiful land may be destroyed in the midst of starvation for the sake of an economic price. Man becomes subordinate to economics, instead of economics to man, and this means a degradation and impoverishment of human dignity.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (The Prodigal World)

"NOW most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities. And Mr. Shaw and such people are especially shrinking from that awful and ancestral responsibility to which our fathers committed us when they took the wild step of becoming men. I mean the responsibility of affirming the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an unshaken voice. That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child. From this high audacious duty the moderns are fleeing on every side; and the only excuse for them is, (of course,) that their modern philosophies are so half-baked and hypothetical that they cannot convince themselves enough to convince even a newborn babe. This, of course, is connected with the decay of democracy; and is somewhat of a separate subject."
~G.K. Chesterton: "What's Wrong With the World." (1910)

Albert Einstein said in 1954: The skeptic will say: "It may well be true that this system of equations is reasonable from a logical standpoint. But this does not prove that it corresponds to nature." You are right, dear skeptic. Experience alone can decide on truth. ... Pure logical thinking cannot yield us any knowledge of the empirical world: all knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.

"A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth." - Albert Einstein

THERE are three ways in which a statement, especially a disputable statement, can be placed before mankind. The first is to assert it by avowed authority; this is done by deities, the priests of deities, oracles, minor poets, parents and guardians, and men who have “a message to their age”. The second way is to prove it by reason; this was done by the mediaeval schoolmen, and by some of the early and comparatively forgotten men of science. It is now quite abandoned. The third method is this: when you have neither the courage to assert a thing nor the capacity to prove it, you allude to it in a light and airy style, as if somebody else had asserted and proved it already. Thus the first method is to say, “Pigs do fly in heaven; I have had a vision of heaven, and you have not.” The second method is to say, “Come down to my little place in Essex, and I will show you pigs flying about like finches and building nests in the elms”. Both these positions require a certain valour to sustain them, and are now, therefore, generally dropped. The third method, which is usually adopted, is to say, “Professor Gubbins belongs to the old school of scientific criticism, and cannot but strike us as limited in this age of wireless telegraphy and aerial swine”; or “Doubtless we should be as much surprised at the deeds of our descendants as would an Ancient Briton at a motor-car or a flying pig, or any such common sight in our streets”. In short, this third method consists in referring to the very thing that is in dispute as if it were now beyond dispute. This is known as the Restrained or Gentlemanly method; it is used by company promoters, by professors of hair-dressing and the other progressive arts, and especially by journalists like myself. ~G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, Aug. 7, 1909

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

JOAN of Arc was not stuck at the cross-roads, either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy, or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path, and went down it like a thunderbolt. Yet Joan, when I came to think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or Nietzsche, all that was even tolerable in either of them. I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy, the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of Arc had all that and with this great addition, that she endured poverty as well as admiring it; whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret. And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche, and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that, and again with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We KNOW that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche, for all we know, was afraid of a cow. Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing. ~G.K. Chesterton: "Orthodoxy," III.

"In vain will the world seek for equality until it has seen men through the eyes of faith. Faith teaches that all men, however poor, or ignorant, or crippled, however maimed, ugly, or degraded they may be, all bear within themselves the image of God, and have been bought by the precious blood of Jesus Christ. As this truth is forgotten, men are valued only because of what they can do, not because of what they are.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (Preface to Religion)

"YOU hold that your heretics and sceptics have helped the world forward and handed on a lamp of progress. I deny it. Nothing is plainer from real history than that each of your heretics invented a complete cosmos of his own which the next heretic smashed entirely to pieces. Who knows now exactly what Nestorius taught? Who cares? There are only two things that we know for certain about it. The first is that Nestorius, as a heretic, taught something quite opposite to the teaching of Arius, the heretic who came before him, and something quite useless to James Turnbull, the heretic who comes after. I defy you to go back to the Free-thinkers of the past and find any habitation for yourself at all. I defy you to read Godwin or Shelley or the deists of the eighteenth century of the nature-worshipping humanists of the Renaissance, without discovering that you differ from them twice as much as you differ from the Pope. You are a nineteenth-century sceptic, and you are always telling me that I ignore the cruelty of nature. If you had been an eighteenth-century sceptic you would have told me that I ignore the kindness and benevolence of nature. You are an atheist, and you praise the deists of the eighteenth century. Read them instead of praising them, and you will find that their whole universe stands or falls with the deity. You are a materialist, and you think Bruno a scientific hero. See what he said and you will think him an insane mystic. No, the great Free-thinker, with his genuine ability and honesty, does not in practice destroy Christianity. What he does destroy is the Free-thinker who went before." ~G.K. Chesterton: "The Ball and the Cross,"

Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred. --C.S. Lewis

"If [the Birth-Controller] can prevent his servants from having families, he need not support those families. Why the devil should he?” wrote Chesterton. “The landlord or the employer says in his hearty and handsome fashion: ‘You really cannot expect me to deprive myself of my money. But I will make a sacrifice. I will deprive myself of your children.’”

"Revolutionists make a reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform. They never reform the reform, which is often very much wanted. Just as the rivalry of armaments is only a sort of sulky plagiarism, so the rivalry of parties is only a sort of sulky inheritance. Men have votes, so women must soon have votes; poor children are taught by force, so they must soon be fed by force; the police shut public houses by twelve o'clock, so soon they must shut them by eleven o'clock; children stop at school till they are fourteen, so soon they will stop till they are forty. No gleam of reason, no momentary return to first principles, no abstract asking of any obvious question, can interrupt this mad and monotonous gallop of mere progress by precedent. It is a good way to prevent real revolution. By this logic of events, the Radical gets as much into a rut as the Conservative."~G.K. Chesterton: "What's Wrong with the World,

Richard Horton, the editor in chief of The Lancet: The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness... The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world... Our love of “significance” pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale... The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability - not the validity - of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.

Living at a time of unprecedented upheaval and social chaos, Benedict of Nursia could not save the Roman Empire from collapse, but he did something more remarkable: he created Europe to take its place. It didn't happen overnight but instead over centuries. Benedict took the best that classical culture had to offer, combined it with Christianity, and came up with a very specific way to live in a world where chaos was the rule. The Rule of St. Benedict proposed in specific terms, down to the amount of beer a monk was allowed to drink, how to live in a world where the empire had failed. Benedict's Rule became, in Dawson's words, "the Roman standard of the monastic life and finally the universal type of Western monasticism." It brought order and classical coherence to the chaotic ethnic existence of the Germanic tribes, as well as the formation of new centers of culture in Ireland, Northumbria, and ultimately the Carolingian Empire.
The Europe Benedict created is now facing another kind of threat. Europe has lost contact with its roots. The Enlightenment separates Europe's contemporary inhabitants from the man who made their culture possible. Cut off from his roots and disillusioned by one failed utopian experiment after another, European Man has contracted a spiritual disease whose clearest manifestation is his inability to reproduce. If this sickness is not cured within the the next generation, Europe will almost certainly reach the demographic tipping point and become a Muslim continent. The same is true of America. Cities like New York are fast on their way to losing their European character. And they are losing it for much the same reason: those of European descent are not having children.
Benedict's vision of the small community is now more relevant than ever. At a time of American imperial over-extension and the threat of imminent collapse, at a time when "citizen" is a euphemism for taxpayer, or cannon fodder, or both, everyone needs a supportive community. At a time of demographic collapse, young people need to know that these small communities will support them so they can marry and raise families. When they fail to receive that assurance from the Church, the young simply fail to marry and have children, creating a sense of doom based on the feeling that there is no future. And they are right. Without children there is no future. Their fears have created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Cut off from Europe's Benedictine past, the Europeans and their American cousins also find themselves cut off from the future by their fear-driven refusal to have children.

“Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.” (Blessed Teresa of Calcutta; National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C, February 5, 1994)

When Harvard University invited Mother Teresa to give a commencement address, she shocked them by taking issue with the gracious invitation they sent to her, as "the most famous person in one of the world's poorest nations, to address the world's richest nation." She said no, "India is not a poor nation; India is a very rich nation. She has a wealth of riches, true spiritual riches. And America is not a rich nation. She is a poor nation, in fact, a desperately poor nation. She slaughters her own unborn children."

For all his purported god-like powers of self-creation, today's Liberal is actually a weak, insecure, and isolated individual. It is not enough that he define and express his identity. He needs others to recognize it, embrace it, and celebrate it. He needs the state to confer dignity upon it. Otherwise, he may find himself marginalized by his peers, crippled by their disapproving looks, and insecure in his choice of an identity. After all, a particular lifestyle or living arrangement may not be illegal, but it can still be viewed as dishonorable by some. An earlier generation of Liberals would have told 'the man' to go to hell with his marriage certificate. To have the 'suits' approve your alternative lifestyle would have defeated the whole purpose of embracing it in the first place. Today's Liberal thinks himself the measure of all things, but must in fact have his solipsistic existence be publicly affirmed and dignified by the state.

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."

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions -- GK Chesterton

But the Cross without Christ is sacrifice without love. Hence, Communism has produced a society that is authoritarian, cruel, oppressive of human freedom, filled with concentration camps, firing squads, and brain-washings.

"To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant." ~Blessed John Cardinal Newman

Whether you are using artificial contraception or NFP, the end result is the same — no babies. All the lingo that NFP promoters use to inspire couples to learn NFP, is simply church-speak for Catholic birth control. Despite being a devoutly Catholic couple, we were contraception-minded, and NFP is contraception.

The SR-71 Blackbird was originally called the RS-71, but in announcing it, President Lyndon Johnson got the initials backwards, and the military decided not to correct the Commander in Chief’s public announcement.

“Freedom is the power to do what we ought. A man can do many things, e.g. shoot his wife, steal his neighbor’s cabbage, or punch his competitor’s nose. But he ought not do these things, because all his rights involve corresponding duties. The power to act a certain way is not the right to act any way.” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (Freedom Under God)

"The other religions may change their principles, and they do change them, because their principles are man-made. The Church cannot change, because her principles are God-made. Religion is not a sum of beliefs that we would like, but the sum of beliefs God has given."

“Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.” (Dr. Peter Kreeft, Jesus Shock)

Both homosexuals and trans-genders are evolutionary dead ends.

Man is in various ways subject to the influence of evil spirits. By original sin he brought himself into "captivity under the power of him who thence [from the time of Adam's transgression] had the empire of death, that is to say, the Devil" (Council of Trent, Sess. V, de pecc. orig., 1), and was through the fear of death all his lifetime subject to servitude (Hebrews 2:15).
Even though redeemed by Christ, he is subject to violent temptation: "for our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places" (Ephesians 6:12). But the influence of the demon, as we know from Scripture and the history of the Church, goes further still. He may attack man's body from without (obsession), or assume control of it from within (possession).
As we gather from the Fathers and the theologians, the soul itself can never be "possessed" nor deprived of liberty, though its ordinary control over the members of the body may be hindered by the obsessing spirit (cf. St. Aug., "De sp. et an.", 27; St. Thomas, "In II Sent.", d. VIII, Q. i; Ribet, "La mystique divine", Paris, 1883, pp. 190 sqq.).

POPE SAINT PIUS X "Kindness is for fools! They want them to be treated with oil, soap, and caresses but they ought to be beaten with fists! In a duel you don't count or measure the blows, you strike as you can! War is not made with charity, it is a struggle a duel. If Our Lord were not terrible He would not have given an example in this too. See how He treated the Philistines, the sowers of error, the wolves in sheep's clothing, the traitors in the temple. He scourged them with whips!"

Modernism: "I am astonished that you should find excessive the measures taken to confine the flood that threatens to swamp us, when the error they are striving to spread is much more deadly that that of Luther, because it aims directly at not only the destruction of the Church, but of Christianity."

"The modern media are engaged in a luciferian conspiracy against the truth." - Marshall McLuhan

“WHEREVER there is Animal Worship there is Human Sacrifice. That is, both symbolically and literally, a real truth of historical experience.”~G.K. Chesterton: "The Uses of Diversity."

"WE do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press."~GKC: "Orthodoxy," Chap VII.—The Eternal Revolution.

A 34-year-old Maryland woman faces a maximum sentence of 10 years after admitting that on two occasions she gave birth to a live baby boy on the toilet, and then allowed the child to drown. Melissa Schrae Bowen of Prince Frederick said she killed her babies because she had three children already and could not afford an abortion. She saw her acts of infanticide as a parallel to legalized abortion.

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.

“A man is perfectly entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as incomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he comprehended it. The very fact of its unfamiliarity and mystery ought to set him thinking about the deeper causes that make people so different from himself, and that without merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself. ~G.K. Chesterton: “What I Saw in America.”

The society in Brave New World is split into five castes: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons, with a few minor distinctions in between. Because of the technology wielded by the World State's leaders, caste is pre-determined and humans are grown in a manner appropriate to their status; the lower the caste, the dumber and uglier the individual is created to be. As adults, the upper two castes interact socially with each other but never with the lesser groups—that would totally be social suicide. Class is yet another mechanism for stability and control on the part of the government. It's also a big part of the reason that personal identity goes by the wayside in this novel—Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons are simply faceless drones in color-coded outfits who exist to serve the more intelligent Alphas and Betas.

“Man is the shadow, who would be the substance; the pendulum who would swing without being suspended from the clock; the painting which would deny that an artist’s hand ever touched it. The most daring of all sins is that of self-deification, and it is possible only because of a divine creation for who would want to be God unless he had come from the hand of God?” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (The World’s First Love)

CS Lewis: "The biological purpose of sex is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body. Now if we eat whenever we feel inclined and just as much as we want, it is quite true most of us will eat too much: but not terrifically too much. One man may eat enough for two, but he does not eat enough for ten. The appetite goes a little beyond its biological purpose, but not enormously. But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function."

CS Lewis: "Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply lifting the cover so as to let every one see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us?"

CS Lewis: "They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been. It has been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. But it has not. I think it is the other way round. I think the human race originally hushed it up because it had become such a mess."

CS Lewis: "In the first place our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and all the contemporary propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the desires we are resisting are so ‘natural’, so ‘healthy,’ and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them. Poster after poster, film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humour."

A tattoo helps turn the bodies we have been given into material we may shape and revise. Yes, each one of us is stuck with the one we’ve got (at this point in time), but we can re-create it, fashioning it into an expression of the identity we prefer. That’s the theory of body art. It spells a transition from the body as physique to the body as text. You can write yourself upon it. As a friend put it to me: A tattoo isn’t the Word made flesh, but the flesh made word. It may strike old-fashioned types as pedestrian narcissism and adolescent conformity, and sometimes it surely is. But in a deeper and more troubling way, it is canny and subversive artifice, spiced with a moralistic claim to personal liberation. It's the first step towards transhumanism.