In all communication there has to be a shared body of knowledge that is taken for granted. We have to agree on what you don’t have to define.
David Cayley
No useful discussion is possible unless both parties to the discussion start from the same premise.
Mediæval Maxim
Few maxims are true in every respect.
Marquis de Vauvenargues
Ezra Pound
In all pointed sentences some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.
Samuel Johnson
There is an accuracy that defeats itself by the overemphasis of details. I often say that one must permit oneself, and quite advisedly and deliberately, a certain margin of misstatement.
Benjamin N. Cardozo
Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.
Very few sentences can withstand analytical criticism because language is not a logical system.
[It sometimes seems better when reading paired
aphorisms—aloud for best results and paraphrasing them according to literary
taste or conversational style, and perhaps adding a bit of commentary as one sees
fit—if you start with the second aphorism rather than the first. (The
order shown below is from my website where I tended to order them with the
generalization or the precept coming first.) For instance, with the pair
below start with “Certain good qualities. . .” —perhaps
keeping Donald Trump in mind:]
The test of good manners is to be patient with bad ones.
Solomon ibn Gabirol
Certain good qualities are like the senses: people entirely lacking in them can neither perceive nor comprehend them.
La Rochefoucauld
Sydney Smith
Many people like their beliefs, opinions and prejudices more than they like reason.
Sacha Guitry
Everyone is guilty of enjoying the comfort of opinion without submitting himself to the discomfort of thought.
Even in my innermost thoughts, I am far from thinking that those who believe differently than I have poorer judgment or from forgetting in how fragile and contingent a manner a man’s opinions are formed.
Jean Rostand
We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem that is threatened.
James Harvey Robinson
There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labour of thinking.
Sir Joshua Reynolds
Our minds are lazier than our bodies.
La Rochefoucauld
Objectivity means that we can separate facts from our thoughts and feelings about those facts.
Arnold Lunn
Most people do not care to be taught what they do not already know; it makes them feel ignorant.
Mary McCarthy
The strongest human instinct is to impart information, the second strongest is to resist it.
Kenneth Grahame
It is as absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing.
John Henry Newman
It is impossible to make any intellectual headway against the steady resistance of a strong negative conviction.
The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.
Stanley Kubrick
The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they are no longer strong.
Winston Churchill
A large part of mankind is angry not with the sins, but with the sinners.
Seneca
Anyone can become angry. That is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose and in the right way—that is not easy.
Aristotle
A large part of mankind is angry not with the sins, but with the sinners.
Seneca
Erich Fromm
God is tolerant, man is not tolerant; Omniscience pardons, frailty is inexorable.
Sidney Smith
To understand everything makes one very tolerant.
Madame de Staël
The man who says “Believe as I do or God will damn you,” will soon be saying, “Believe as I do or I will kill you.”
Voltaire
Intolerance, judiciously applied, is a virtue.
Charles Davenport
Political correctness. . .engenders a coercive culture of ritualized insincere approval. . . the majority can feel that it is being compelled to accord moral approval to practices that, at best, it only tolerates.
Michael Ignatieff
Is it essentially intolerant to demand that people should renounce their whole world view in the interests of tolerance?
The test of good manners is to be patient with bad ones.
Solomon ibn Gabirol
Certain good qualities are like the senses: people entirely lacking in them can neither perceive nor comprehend them.
La Rochefoucauld
Courtesy is to virtue as words are to thought.
Joseph Joubert
No man can put more virtue into his words than he practises in his life.
Hugh Kingsmill
Blaming or scapegoating someone always implies the claim that we would have done better in their shoes. It’s a way of protesting our innocence and brightening our self-esteem.
David Cayley
Nobody can doubt that nine-tenths of the harm in the world is done simply by talking.
G. K. Chesterton
Richard Livingstone
None of us know what exactly is the sexual code we believe in, approving of many things on paper which we violently object to when they are practised by those we care about.
Beatrice Webb
It is absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do. They are driven by instincts which are not within their control.
Virginia Woolf
Samuel Johnson
People react to fear, not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday School, but it’s true.
Richard Nixon
William Hazlitt
The love of justice is, in most men, nothing more than the fear of suffering injustice.
La Rochefoucauld
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul.
George Bernard Shaw
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
Thomas Jefferson
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.
Lord Acton
A good test of character is how one reacts to the weaknesses of other people.
It’s a sign of maturity not to be scandalized.
Flannery O’Connor
It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.
George Bernard Shaw
Observe how the greatest minds yield in some degree to the superstitions of their age.
Henry David Thoreau
In the Summa Theologica Thomas Aquinas poses the question of whether heretics can be endured, tolerated. And his answer is that heretics can not be tolerated. If it was just to condemn counterfeiters to death, then surely it was necessary to put to death those who had committed the far worse crime of counterfeiting the faith.
Observe how the greatest minds yield in some degree to the superstitions of their age.
Henry David Thoreau
No one is more liable to make mistakes than the man who acts only on reflection.
Marquis de Vauvenargues
It is sometimes better not to think at all than to think intensely and think wrong.
George Bernard Shaw
For every person who wants to teach there are approximately thirty who don’t want to learn—much.
W. C. Sellar
It is futile and vastly expensive to try to teach people things they are not motivated to learn.
Christopher Derrick
John Kenneth Galbraith
The two predominant activities of liberal education are reading and conversation.
Albert Einstein
Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know; it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.
John Ruskin
Robert Frost
The need to be right—the sign of a vulgar mind.
Albert Camus
Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The chief use to which we put our love of truth is in persuading ourselves that what we love is true.
Pierre Nicole
The truth is generally seen, rarely heard.
Gracian
The chief use to which we put our love of truth is in persuading ourselves that what we love is true.
Pierre Nicole
Sometimes the surest way to upset people is to tell them the truth.
Margaret Wente
Sometimes the surest way to upset people is to tell them the truth.
Margaret Wente
I don’t want any yes-men around me. I want everyone to tell the truth—even if it costs him his job.
Samuel Goldwyn
What ardently we wish, we soon believe.
Edward Young
Malcolm Muggeridge
Malcolm Muggeridge
We demand strict proof for opinions we dislike, but are satisfied with mere hints for what we’re inclined to accept.
John Henry Newman
H. L. Mencken
It is folly to expect people to do all that you would reasonably expect them to do.
Archbishop Whately
There is nothing purely rational which is strong enough to bind the heart of man.
Karl Stern
A man convinced against his will,
Is of the same opinion still.
G. K. Chesterton
It is as absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing.
John Henry Newman
Of all follies there is none greater than wanting to put the world to rights.
Molière
The
troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
A. E. Housman
As the years passed, I ceased to make my personal tastes the criterion for my views of the social order. I discovered that the politically-minded may be divided into those who accept the facts of human nature and those who plan their programmes on the naive assumption that man is what they wish man to be. It is, perhaps, regrettable that man is a hierarchical animal, with an invincible tendency to create distinctions, but the realist starts from facts, and does not plan for the future on the assumption that a classeless society is realisable in this geological period.
People without human passions, loyalties and appetites could undoubtedly handle the world’s problems with laughable ease: a restatement of the view held by Aristotle (and your grandfather) that human nature is our chief problem.
Wilfrid Sheed
The youth of twenty who does not think the world can be improved is a cad; the man of forty who still thinks it can is a fool.
Hesketh Pearson
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
George Orwell
Beyond a certain level of intensity, medicine engenders helplessness and disease.
Ivan Illich
Nothing is more fatal to health than an over care of it.
Benjamin Franklin
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
Oscar Wilde
The major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur.
A. N. Whitehead
Change is inevitable, progress is problematic.
Bertrand Russell
Ronald Reagan
John F. Kennedy
Always be sincere, even if you don’t mean it.
Harry S. Truman
Politicians neither love nor hate. Interest, not sentiment, directs them.
Lord Chesterfield
Ambrose Bierce
Government comprises a large part of the organized injustice in any society, ancient or modern.
Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
H. L. Mencken
Law and order is one of the steps taken to maintain injustice.
Edward Bond
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
Martin Luther King
Clayton Ruby
You get only the amount of justice you can afford, no more, no less.
Wilfrid Sheed
Hugh Kingsmill
It’s not anger that’s wrong, it’s being angry at the wrong thing that’s wrong. It’s not hatred that’s wrong, it’s hating the wrong thing that’s wrong.
Men love with their eyes, but women love with their ears.
Zsa Zsa Gabor
Erica Jong
Women like to be courted.
Milton Wright
Gallantry to women—the sure road to their favour—is nothing but the appearance of extreme devotion to all their wants and wishes, a delight in their satisfaction, and a confidence in yourself, as being able to contribute towards it.
William Hazlitt
The sum of the matter is that unless Woman repudiates her Womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself.
George Bernard Shaw
The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman’s Rights’ with all its attendant horrors on which her poor, feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.
Queen Victoria
Stupidity is a force of real power in human affairs.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Sloan Wilson
Equality is essential to conversation.
Every man has a right to be wrong in his opinions. But no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.
Bernard Baruch
It doesn’t pay to tell someone they are wrong.
Dale Carnegie
When you object to someone’s attitude or opinion on moral grounds, it invariably causes bad feeling.
Friendship can exist in the absence of agreement, but not in the absence of sympathy.
Sidney Cockerell
Virginia Woolf
Very few people listen to argument.
G. K. Chesterton
Many people like their beliefs, opinions and prejudices more than they like argument.
Very few people listen to argument.
G. K. Chesterton
Time makes more converts than reason.
Tom Paine
Perhaps no sin so easily besets us as a sense of self-satisfied superiority to others.
Sir William Osler
Sydney J. Harris
We often irritate others when we think we could not possibly do so.
La Rochefoucauld
The degree to which a person is loved and accepted is in exact proportion to his or her ability to give enjoyment to others—family sometimes excepted.
The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.
William Hazlitt
The most important trait in determining a person’s attractiveness is the degree of their negativity: the more negative, the less attractive.
John Keats
A man must have grown old and lived long in order to see how short life is.
Arthur Schopenhauer
When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
Mark Twain
What a man knows at fifty which he didn’t know at twenty is, for the most part, incommunicable.
Adlai Stevenson
Samuel Butler
Lewis Mumford
George Orwell (from The Prevention of Literature, 1946)
Bertrand Russell
Samuel Johnson
People only see what they are prepared to see.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A man has his beliefs: his arguments are only his excuses for them . . . we only see what we look at: our attention to our temperamental convictions produces complete oversight as to all the facts that tell against us.
George Bernard Shaw
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.
John Stuart Mill
If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from his angle as well as your own.
Dale Carnegie
G. K. Chesterton
In a world that possesses no force superior to that of arms, a body of armed men that attacks an enemy’s territory can do pretty much what it wants—rob and kill anybody it meets, destroy crops, burn the houses—unless the enemy produces a similar body of armed men.
Gwynne Dyer
To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.
George Washington
At bottom, every state regards another as a gang of robbers who will fall upon it as soon as there is an opportunity.
Schopenhauer
War is the province of uncertainty; three-fourths of the things on which action in war is based lie hidden in the fog of greater or less uncertainty.
Karl von Clausewitz
Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.
Machiavelli
Direct and simple language always has some force behind it.
Northrop Frye
Broadly speaking, the short words are best, and the old words best of all.
Winston Churchill
Words, like eyeglasses, blur everything that they do not make clearer.
Joseph Joubert
Northrop Frye
Language is not an infallible guide, but it contains, with all its defects, a good deal of stored insight and experience. If you begin by flouting it, it has a way of avenging itself later on.
C. S. Lewis
Josef Pieper
Sydney Smith
John Kenneth Galbraith
Hugh Kingsmill
John Kenneth Galbraith
Injustice is relatively easy to bear: what stings is justice.
H. L. Mencken
It’s hard to forgive someone you’ve wronged.
Charles Kingsley
I have known some quite good people who were unhappy, but never an interested person who was unhappy.
A. C. Benson
Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.
Michael Holroyd (biographer)
Allow children to be happy in their own way, for what better way will they ever find?
Samuel Johnson
Sydney Smith
Those who are now pursuing pleasure are not only fleeing from boredom, but are acutely suffering from it.
G. K. Chesterton
A certain amount of excitement is wholesome, but, like almost everything else, the matter is quantitative. Too little may produce morbid cravings; too much will produce exhaustion. A certain power of enduring boredom is therefore essential to a happy life, and is one of the things that ought to be taught to the young.
Bertrand Russell
One must choose in life between boredom and suffering.
Mme de Staël
This is the greatest paradox: the emotions cannot be trusted, yet it is they that tell us the greatest truths.
Don Herold
All the settlement and sane government of life consists in coming to the conclusion that some instincts, impulses or inspirations have authority, and others do not.
G. K. Chesterton
G. K. Chesterton
The practically real world for each of us, the effective world of the individual, is the compound world, the physical facts and emotional values in indistinguishable combination. Withdraw or pervert either factor of this complex resultant, and the kind of experience we call pathological ensues.
William James
Most emotion originates on the level of sense experience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
M. Scott Peck
C. S. Lewis
The passion of love is the most familiar and extreme example of the importance of the inner element in experience. If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved as utterly as the sunrise transforms Mount Blanc from a corpse-like grey to a rosy enchantment; and it sets the whole world to a new tune for the lover and gives a new direction to his life.
William James
I have every reason to love you. What I lack is the unreason.
Robert Mallet
When a thing bores you do not do it. Do not pursue a fruitless perfection.
Eugène Delacroix
The two enemies of human happiness are pain and boredom.
Arthur Schopenhauer
I think that the word bored does not get the attention it deserves. We speak of all sorts of terrible things that happen to people, but we rarely speak about one of the most terrible things of all: that is, being bored, being bored alone and, worse than that, being bored together.
Erich Fromm
Underlying my poor tolerance for boredom lies an even deeper gift or curse: a thirst for meaning. As far back as I can remember, any activity that seemed meaningless to me bored me figuratively—and sometimes even literally—to tears.
M. Scott Peck
Boredom was and is a word I never understood. So much to see, do and learn.
Ted Schmidt
Nothing is worse for your health than boredom.
Mignon McLaughlin
People who bore one another should meet seldom, people who interest one another, often.
C. S. Lewis
We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those who find us boring.
de La Rochefoucauld
Boredom, after all, is a form of criticism.
Wendell Phillips
I would rather be a failure at something that I loved than a success at something that I hated.
George Burns
Find a job that you love and you will never work a day in your life.
Confucius
Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
J. M. Barrie
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.
All’s Well That Ends Well (1st Lord)
What a queer thing life is! So unlike anything else, if you see what I mean.
P. G. Wodehouse (Bertie Wooster)
In his early 70s Bertrand Russell remarked, ‘The world takes a lot of getting used to, and I have only lately begun to feel more or less at home in it.’
Lester L. Havens
Italo Svevo
Had God designed the world, it would not be
A world so frail and faulty as we see.
Lucretius
M. Scott Peck
William James
Golden lads and girls all must,
As Chimney sweepers, come to dust.
Cymbeline (Guiderius)
Thomas Gray
If some persons died, and others did not die, death would indeed be a terrible affliction.
La Bruyère
H. G. Wells
As for future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague possibilities.
Charles Darwin
Common sense is a form of insight, but it’s not infallible.
We seldom attribute common sense except to those who agree with us.
La Rochefoucauld
Desire is the very essence of man.
Spinoza
Bertrand Russell
Hope in every sphere of life is a privilege that attaches to action. No action, no hope.
Peter Levi
Hope is the basic ingredient of all vitality.
Erik Erikson
The first condition of right thought is right sensation.
T. S. Eliot
The mind is always the dupe of the heart.
La Rochefoucauld
William James
A belief is not necessarily false because it happens to be consoling.
Daniel Dennett (from Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 1995)
Religious (or simple) fundamentalism is the inability to see that words can’t do what we thought they could do, namely, establish truth with authority and without ambiguity. Philosophical (or sophisticated) fundamentalism is the inability to see that arguments can’t do what we thought they could do, namely, establish truth authoritatively and unambiguously.
The analogy is a particularly tricky form of rhetoric when it becomes the basis of an argument rather than merely a figure of speech.
Northrop Frye
A drop of water is not immortal; it can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen. If, therefore, a drop of water were to maintain that it had a quality of aqueousness which would survive its dissolution we should be inclined to be sceptical.
Bertrand Russell (arguing against immortality)
Arguments that don’t satisfy us emotionally usually don’t satisfy us intellectually. Everyone weighs certain kinds of evidence differently depending on what they want or don’t want to believe.
The closest we can get to impartiality is admitting we are partial.
G. K. Chesterton
Perfection in making is an art, perfection in acting is a virtue.
Aristotle
Michael Mason
A person who believes in unalterable natural law can’t believe in any miracle in any age. A person who believes in a will behind law can believe in any miracle in any age.
The interference of the human will with the course of Nature is not an exception to law: and by the same rule interference by the divine will would not be an exception either.
John Stuart Mill
The case for any world view cannot be based on a mathematical certainty—as in the proposition, ‘Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one other.’
Every philosophical position has its own difficulties. The question one must decide is not whether the answers to the difficulties of some particular philosophy are completely satisfying, but whether they are more satisfying than the answers to the difficulties inherent in alternative philosophies.
Arnold Lunn
Bertrand Russell
Metaphysics is the only thoroughly emotional thing.
G. K. Chesterton
George Bernard Shaw
Metaphysical arguments for the existence of God have all been shown to be invalid by competent philosophers.
J. F. Brown (psychologist)
Throughout the long tradition of European thought it has been said, not by everyone but by most people, or at any rate by most of those who have proved that they have a right to be heard, that Nature, though it is a thing that really exists, is not a thing that exists in itself or in its own right, but a thing which depends for its existence upon something else.
R. G. Collingwood
All science requires faith in the inner harmony of the world.
He who wishes to learn must believe.
Aristotle
To many working scientists, science seems very obviously to suggest an ultimate explanation, namely a materialist one; but a materialist view of total reality is a metaphysical, not a scientific, theory.
Bryan Magee
Stephen Hawking
Walter Kaufmann
A man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool.
I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith.
Immanuel Kant
Bertrand Russell
Not everything can be justified on the basis of reasoned argument. Some things have to be justified on the basis of instinct or intuition, which, in turn, depend on faith or that closely related thing, common sense.
Without faith—or something very like it—logic can’t get any traction.
Religion by its very nature is unpopular, unpopular with the ego.
Fulton Sheen
Speak, Lord, for Thy servant is listening.
RELIGION: Insurance in this world against fire in the next.
Men despise religion; they hate it, and fear it is true.
Pascal
Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe—a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.
Probably the two most famous philosophers of the twentieth century in the English speaking world were Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In 1911 the 39 year old Russell tried to get the 22 year old Wittgenstein to consider the proposition: There is no hippopotamus in this room at present. When Wittgenstein refused to believe this Russell looked under all the desks without finding one. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein remained unconvinced.
Philosophy is the search for truth in the reasonable expectation of finding some.
Scepticism can quickly reach a point where it becomes meaningless to talk of the alternatives of reason and faith. Reason itself becomes a matter of faith. It becomes an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
The hope of understanding the world is itself one of those daydreams which science tends to dissipate. There is little but prejudice and habit to be said for the view that there is a world at all.
Bertrand Russell
Accept my premises and I will lead you infallibly to my conclusions.
Your conclusions can be completely wrong even though your logic is completely right.
Alan Wood
You can never prove your first statement or it would not be your first.
G. K. Chesterton
You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
G. K. Chesterton
Logic is always an ‘if. . . then. . .’ process which proceeds from the known to the unknown. But if nothing is known at the beginning of the process, then nothing can ever be known. You can’t use logic to generate knowledge from a state of total ignorance.
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
Albert Einstein
Mystery can be a positive experience and not just a negative state of ignorance or incomprehension.
The hardest thing to understand is how we can understand anything at all.
Sometimes it proves the highest understanding not to understand.
Gracian
The chief difficulty in regard to knowledge does not arise over derivative knowledge, but over intuitive knowledge. So long as we are dealing with derivative knowledge, we have the test of intuitive knowledge to fall back upon. But in regard to intuitive beliefs, it is by no means easy to discover any criterion by which to distinguish some as true and others as erroneous. In this question it is scarcely possible to reach any very precise result: all our knowledge of truths is infected with some degree of doubt, and a theory which ignored this fact would be plainly wrong.
Bertrand Russell (from The Problems of Philosophy, 1912)
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell
The word “prove” has two distinct meanings, one strict and one colloquial, that have very little to do with one another. The strict meaning of “prove,” as understood by logicians and mathematicians, is to reason syllogistically such that the conclusion states explicitly what is already contained—but implicit—in the premises. The ordinary wide meaning of “prove”—as in the courtroom phrase “to prove beyond a reasonable doubt”—is to ascertain knowledge with a high degree of probability through evidence and reason.
Reason, in the fullest sense of the word, is about making rational inferences from “reasonable” premises. But most of the rational inferences we make in philosophy and science, as well as in practical life, are non-demonstrative. In other words, most of the inferences employed by reason are not, strictly speaking, logical (or deductive or demonstrative or necessary) inferences.
G. K. Chesterton
C. S. Lewis
A dislike of defined dogmas really means a preference for unexamined dogmas.
G. K. Chesterton
The world of values is a real world. Otherwise we’re in the position of admitting that we believe and take very seriously all sorts of thing that are unreal, such as that stealing is wrong, heroism is admirable, torture is horrible, sunsets are beautiful, Shakespeare is a good playwright, etc., etc.
The world of thought and of spiritual values, on the threshold of which man has the consciousness of standing, is a real world, an order no less great than the material order, and it is only in this world that we shall find a solution to the otherwise hopeless conflict between man’s spiritual aspirations and the limitations of his material existence.
Christopher Dawson
Secular Liberalism was born on the shores of Lake Geneva in the salons of Madame Necker and Madame de Staël. Its basic doctrine was defined in the proposition: “It is contrary to the natural, innate and inalienable right and liberty and dignity of man to subject himself to an authority the root, rule and measure and sanction of which is not in himself.”
Liberal humanists were rationalists in their criticism of dogmatic religion, but their own ideology is based on a non-rational dogmatism, an intuitive experience which is half mystical and half emotional.
Christopher Dawson
Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.
William F. Buckley
The trouble with you liberals is you get uneasy when people don’t agree with you.
H. L. Mencken
Immanuel Kant
Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional.
M. Scott Peck
I was taught when I was young that if people would only love one another, all would be well with the world. This seemed simple and very nice; but I found when I tried to put it in practice not only that other people were seldom lovable, but that I was not very lovable myself . . . you will find yourself making friends with people whose opinions are the very opposite to your own, whilst you cannot bear the sight of others who share all your beliefs. You may love your dog and find your nearest relatives detestable. So don’t waste your time arguing whether you ought to love all your neighbours. You can’t help yourself; and neither can they.
George Bernard Shaw (from a broadcast to sixth forms in 1937)
J. H. Newman
Fr. Michel Quoist
All God wants is gratitude and self-surrender. He needs nothing from us except our love.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux
It is a great mistake to suppose that love unites and unifies men. Love diversifies them, because love is directed towards individuality. The thing that really unites men and makes them like to each other is hatred.
Movements born in hatred very quickly take on the characteristics of the thing they oppose.
J. S. Habgood
The emergence of life from lifeless matter necessarily involves the kind of process which may roughly be described as a miracle. The reader can choose between a grotesquely improbable miracle, and a rational miracle. He can believe, if he wishes, that the complicated structure of a cell, with the power to reproduce itself, floated off the primeval seas as the result of pure chance, or alternatively that this cell was created by a supernatural act of God.
Arnold Lunn (from Now I See, 1933)
The origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to be satisfied to get it going.
Just walking along the road we lived in when I was a child I would find myself wondering, with a poignancy I find it difficult now to convey, who I was and how I came to be in that place.
Malcolm Muggeridge
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
G. K. Chesterton
The only alternative to social suicide is the restoration of the family. Sooner or later the state will realise that it can neither take the place of the family nor do without it.
Christopher Dawson
In the early days of the Communist regime in Russia ‘free love’ was preached. The resulting insecurity was so catastrophic that it threatened the stability of the State, and it wasn’t long before all the laws and regulations surrounding marriage were back in place.
I think that capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself is in many ways extremely objectionable.
Maynard Keynes
Normally speaking, it may be said that the forces of a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer and thus increase the gap between them.
Jawaharlal Nehru
By and large the United States is run by the corporations and they hire lawyers from Whittier and actors from Warner Brothers to impersonate presidents, but the actual governing of the United States is done in the board rooms of America.
Gore Vidal
Perhaps the simultaneously most profound and silliest words ever written were: “We hold these truths to be self-evident...”
M. Scott Peck
Literature is preoccupied with the significance of life while journalism is preoccupied with the phenomena.
Malcolm Muggeridge
Literature is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound
C. S. Lewis
It is taken as basic by all the culture of our age that whenever artists and audience lose touch, the fault must be wholly on the side of the audience. (I have never come across the great work in which this important doctrine is proved.)
C. S. Lewis
The public does not like bad literature. The public likes a certain kind of literature and likes that kind of literature even when it is bad better than another kind of literature even when it is good.
G. K. Chesterton
Robert Graves
Hugh Kingsmill
Intolerance respecting other people’s religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people’s art [or taste].
Wallace Stevens
Winston Churchill
Aristotle