Notable Quotable 374

Jan 24, 2025

When you make your peace with authority, you become authority.

- Jim Morrison

The task of all good men today should be to relight the flame of civilization. I could re-state the same sentence in a thousand ways: to decrease societal time preference, to renew faith in God and his Word, to improve social technology, etc. And yet, the original civilizers did not civilize through electronic devices, at office desks, on their behinds, during conferences and conventions. The original civilization was a baked mud cabin and a fire illuminating a dangerous black void. It would be wise to remember that theory was a consequence of civilization, and that civilization was a project of stone, sweat, blood, fire and flesh before a project of the mind.

- Mark Yuray

The gift of mental power comes from God, Divine Being, and if we concentrate our minds on that truth, we become in tune with this great power. My Mother had taught me to seek all truth in the Bible.

- Nikola Tesla

Nothing will come of nothing; we must dare mighty things.

- William Shakespeare

The truth is that any advance in science leaves morality in its ancient balance; and it depends still on the inscrutable soul of man whether any discovery is mainly a benefit or mainly of calamity. This is, perhaps, the strongest argument for a morality superior to materialism, and a religion that refuses to be bullied by science. Moral progress must still be made morally; and a modern scientist, who has invented the most complex mechanism, or liberated the most subtle gas, has still exactly the same spiritual problem before him as that which confronted Cain, when he stood with a ragged stone in his hand.

- G.K. Chesterton

Strike.Me

Buy Me a Coffee

It's the truth I'm after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.

- Marcus Aurelius

Conscience, Christ, and the gift of faith make evil men uneasy in their sin. They feel that if they could drive Christ from the earth, they would be free from "moral inhibitions." They forget that it is their own nature and conscience which makes them feel that way. Being unable to drive God from the heavens, they would drive his ambassadors from the earth. In a lesser sphere, that is why many men sneer at virtue--because it makes vice uncomfortable.

- Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

Man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He makes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon toward himself to recover his inner being.

- Jean-Paul Sartre

By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanized or brutalized control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos. Out of Liberalism itself come philosophies which deny it.

- T.S. Eliot

There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of the law and in the name of justice.

- Montesquieu