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POLITICS
Freedom is not license to do what is wrong, it is the ability to do what is right.
"What we have called the 'British tradition' was made explicit mainly by a group of Scottish moral philosophers led by David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson, seconded by their English contemporaries Josiah Tucker, Edmund Burke, and William Paley, and drawing largely on a tradition rooted in the jurisprudence of the common law. Opposed to them was the tradition of the French Enlightenment, deeply imbued with Cartesian rationalism: the Encyclopedists and Rousseau, the Physiocrats and ondorcet, are the best-known representatives. [...]
Though these two groups are now commonly lumped together as the ancestors of modern liberalism, there is hardly a greater contrast imaginable than that between their respective conceptions of the evolution and functioning of a social order and the role played in it by liberty. The difference is directly traceable to the predominance of an essentially empiricist view of the world in England and a rationalist approach in France. The main contrast in the practical conclusions to which these approaches led has recently been well put, as follows: "One finds the essence of freedom in spontaneity and the absence of coercion, the other believes it to be realized only in the pursuit and attainment of an absolute collective purpose"; and "one stands for organic, slow, half-conscious growth, the other for doctrinaire deliberateness; one for trial and error procedure, the other for an enforced solely valid pattern." It is the second view, as J.L. Talmon has shown in an important book from which this description is taken, that has become the origin of totalitarian democracy.
The sweeping success of the political doctrines that stem from the French tradition is probably due to their great appeal to human pride and ambition. But we must not forget that the political conclusions of the two schools derive from different conceptions of how society works. In this respect the British philosophers laid the foundations of a profound and essentially valid theory, while the rationalist school was simply and completely wrong."
- F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty |
MODERN LIFE
"Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance."
- G.K Chesteron, The Speaker, 12-15-1900
"The spirit of lawlessness came in with the Reformation, and Liberalism is its offspring."
- John Henry Cardinal Newman
"Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution."
- G.K Chesterton
"The flight from faith, the flight from morals and the flight from beauty are coincident phenomena."
- Arnold Lunn, The Third Day
"Literature is the expression, through the artistic medium of words, of the dogmas of the Catholic Church, and that which is in anyway out of harmony with these dogmas is not literature, [for] Catholic dogma is merely the witness, under a special symbolism, of the enduring facts of human nature and the universe."
- Arthur Machen, Hieroglyphics: Notes on the Ecstatic in Literature |
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FAITH
TO THOSE WHO WERE ROBBED OF LIFE:
the unborn, the weak, the sick, the old, during the dark ages of madness, selfishness, lust and greed for which the last decades of the twentieth century are remembered...
-- C. Everett Koop, MD
"Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want"
-- Mother Teresa, 2-3-94
"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."
- G.K Chesteron, What's Wrong With The World, Chapter 5, 1910
"To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant"
- John Henry Cardinal Newman
"Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn."
- Fulton J. Sheen
"These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own."
- G.K Chesteron, ILN 8-11-1928
"There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions."
- G.K Chesteron, ILN, 1-13-1906
"If angels could be jealous of men, they would be so for one reason: Holy Communion."
- St. Maximilian Kolbe
"Even if Catholics faithful to Tradition are reduced to a handful, they are the ones who are the True Church of Jesus Christ."
- St. Athanasius
"Lord, help me to preach the Gospel wherever I go, and if I must, even through words."
- St. Francis of Assisi
"Unless you believe, you will not understand."
- Saint Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio
"Let nothing disturb you; nothing frighten you. All things are passing. God never changes. Patience obtains all things. Nothing is wanting to him who possesses God. God alone suffices."
- St. Teresa of Avila
"If I were worthy of such a favor from my God, I would ask that he grant me this one miracle: that by His grace He would make of me a good man."
- St. Ansgar |
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