The Quote Files, "N" Quotes, 12/10/2008

"In his role as gadfly, [Princeton's University Center for Human Values Professor] Peter Singer renders the very useful service of making clear that the logic supporting the unlimited abortion license imposed by the Supreme Court in 1973's Roe v. Wade decision necessarily extends to infanticide, euthanasia, eugenics, and other measures that he espouses, and for which many who support that license wrongly criticize him as an extremist. Peter Singer, with his scheme of individual preference utilitarianism, has simply thought the matter through more consistently than most supporters of the pro-choice position, which is a position of -- although such people may never have heard the phrase before -- individual preference utilitarianism."

"The public expunging of the religious particularity of those who are not privileged to be in a minority is no simple matter. If Christians are particularistic enough, they, too, can be publicly acknowledged without embarrassment. The Amish, for instance, get a free ride. Given the continuing decline of the mainline Protestant churches into the sideline, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Episcopalians may soon be exotic enough for public celebration. That will leave only evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics as a serious threat to the multicultural creed of the Church of the Glorious Mosaic.

It is a mistake to view this process as one of secularization. As culture is derived from cultus, so multiculturalism requires many cults. Whatever is sacred in public rituals that are, in the words of the Times, "secular yet sacred" must not be permitted to refer to
anything so transcendently sacred as to be capable of constituting a culture. Shards of many sacred stories may be cherished for the pleasures of diversity, but we cannot allow one story to be privileged, lest it attain hegemony and lead simple folk to think that we are, after all, participants in a culture with a definite history and even a name. The Christian West has become the culture that dare not speak its name."

Richard John Neuhaus, "The Empty Creche", National Review, December 31, 1996

"The problem, of course, is that neither [church nor state] is prepared to remain within its institutional boundaries. Government, if it is to be sustainable, engages beliefs and loyalties of an ultimate sort that can properly be called religious. As the impulse of the modern state is to define all public space as governmental space, so the consequence is a tendency toward "civil religion." Religion, on the other hand, if it represents a com- prehensive belief system, speaks to the human condition in all its aspects, including the right ordering (the government) of public life....Thus each institution is, in the eyes of the other, constantly bursting its bounds. Therein is the foundation of the open-ended argument between church and state. Open-ended, that is, so long as a society professes to be democratic."

"Our righteousness is in Him, and our hope depends, not upon the exercise of grace in us, but upon the fullness of grace and love in Him, and upon His obedience unto death."

"I am not what I ought to be. I am not what I want to be. I am not what I hope to be. But still, I am not what I used to be. And by the grace of God, I am what I am."

"The love I bear Christ is but a faint and feeble spark, but it is an emanation from himself: He kindled it and he keeps it alive; and because it is his work, I trust many waters shall not quench it...."

"He knows our sorrows, not merely as He knows all things, but as one who has been in our situation, and who, though without sin Himself, endured when upon earth inexpressibly more for us than He will ever lay upon us."

"I compare the troubles which we have to undergo in the course of the year to a great bundle of #######, far too large for us to lift. But God does not require us to carry the whole at once. He mercifully unties the bundle, and gives us first one stick, which we are to carry today, and then another, which we are to carry tomorrow, and so on. This we might easily manage, if we would only take the burden appointed for each day; but we choose to increase our troubles by carrying yesterday's stick over again today, and adding tomorrow's burden to the load, before we are required to bear it."

"Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness."

Reinhold Niebuhr

Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra [1896]

"The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for 
the first time."

Friedrich Nietzsche

"Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Source: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

"There is not enough religion in the world to destroy the world's religions."

Friedrich Nietzsche

"Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, 
it is the rule."

Friedrich Nietzsche

"How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy."

Friedrich Nietzsche

"The great end of art is to strike the imagination with the power of a soul that refuses 
to admit defeat even in the midst of a collapsing world."

Friedrich Nietzsche

"Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose."

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist

"In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in 
large kitchens the cooking is usually bad."

Friedrich Nietzche

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. 
And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil [1885-1886]

"Simply by being compelled to keep constantly on his guard, a man may grow so weak as to 
be unable to any longer defend himself."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo [1888]

"Then what is freedom? It is the will to be responsible to ourselves."
 
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1888

"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."

Friedrich Nietzsche

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

Anais Nin, (1914-1977, French-born American Novelist, Dancer)

"When politicians say "I'm in politics," it may or may not be possible to trust them, but when they say, "I'm in public service," you know you should flee."

"Here is the Golden Rule of sound citizenship, the first and greatest lesson in the study of politics: You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things FOR you carries with it the equivalent power to do things TO you."

"For the majority of people liberty means only the system and the administrators they are used to."

"There is no doubt that the government of this former republic is growing ever more tyrannical. The question remains: When, if ever, will there again arise a breed of patriots willing to step up to the plate?"

"A movement to resist tyranny demands a leader and no leader determined to resist tyranny and to rally freedom-loving Americans has appeared anywhere on the horizon. I also know that power corrupts and many a rebellion against tyranny, having won the victory, has merely resulted in replacing the old brand of tyranny with a new brand. Indeed, never in history has there been a band of patriots like the Founding Fathers, men who in the name of liberty defeated a tyrant and then resisted the temptation to seize power for themselves. The chances that such a band or such a man as George Washington can again emerge to lead a new American Revolution and build a new nation dedicated to the principles of liberty and equality as God-given rights are pretty small."

"Memorial Day is a day we remember and honor those who fought and often died for their country. It is fitting that we do so. It is not, however, a day that we are called on to forgive those who have brought on us the horrors of war. As a nation we are not called on to do that; as individuals, as the years pass by and memories fade some of us will. But some can never."

"One of the things that bothers me most is the growing belief in the country that security is more important than freedom. It ain't."

"It occurs to me (years too late, of course) that Bill Clinton should have been known as 'The Wizard of Is'."

"The reason this country continues its drift toward socialism and big nanny government is because too many people vote in the expectation of getting something for nothing, not because they have a concern for what is good for the country. A better educated electorate might change the reason many persons vote. If children were forced to learn about the Constitution, about how government works, about how this nation came into being, about taxes and about how government forever threatens the cause of liberty perhaps we wouldn't see so many foolish ideas coming out of the mouths of silly old men."

Lyn Nofziger

"One of the things that bothers me most is the growing belief in this country that security is more important than freedom. It ain't."

"And what will happen to our own civilization, when the full atheistic agenda of the ACLU has finally and completely been accomplished? When there is no one who can speak publicly, under government auspices, about the ground of our rights? When no public symbols or ceremonies remind the young of these sacred sources, from whose depths alone spring their special nobility and unique calling? When the United States of America has thoroughly abandoned in public the faith of our forebears, and only the desolate winds of atheism blow across our monuments? When our rights are reduced to those of a barnyard? Poor ACLU. No more than the Jacobins of France in 1789 do they know what they do."