Brougham

Lord Brougham said something very wise. 'Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave'."

Ireland

Oscar Wilde described English rule in Ireland as 'stupidity aggravated by good intentions.'

Msgr. Gilbey

Monsignor Gilbey is cited as saying, "We are not led to undo the work of creation or to rectify the Fall. The duty of the Christian is not to leave the world a better place. His duty is to leave this world a better man."

Imperium

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento
(Hae tibi erunt artes), pacisque imponere morem,
Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.

Pay heed, Roman, to ruling the nations under your sway. This shall be your special skill, to impose the way of peace, to spare the humbled and to crush the proud.

Virgil, Aeneid

Scudery, Mme. de

Madeleine de Scudéry: Love is a flighty creature which desires everything and can be contented with almost nothing.

Democratic party

Stricherz highlighted the importance of bringing the common people back to power. "I think the average folks are more commonsensical and less inclined to corruption than the elites." "I would take the first hundred people from the phone book in Boston rather than the first 100 academics from Harvard to run the country."

Darwin still missing links

I don't want to turn this into a discussion of the case for or against Darwinism. But let me quote one comment by the late Colin Patterson, a senior paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History. He had already written an introductory text called Evolution. After it came out, a curious reader asked why he had not included in the book any "direct illustrations of evolutionary transitions." Patterson replied: "You say I should at least 'show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.' I will lay it on the line -- there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument. The reason is that statements about ancestry and descent are not applicable in the fossil record. Is Archaeopteryx the ancestor of all birds? Perhaps yes, perhaps no: there is no way of answering the question. It is easy enough to make up stories of how one form gave rise to another, and to find reasons why the stages should be favoured by natural selection. But such stories are not part of science, for there is no way of putting them to the test."

At about that time, Patterson gave a talk to curators at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In the course of his talk he said that there was "not one thing" that he knew about evolution although he had been studying it for twenty years. He challenged colleagues to tell him "any one thing that you think is true," but was answered with silence. That was in 1981.

Jews in Calcutta

The Jewish community built at least five synagogues and two schools. Today, there are 700 students at the Elias Meyer Free School and Talmud Torah. Not one is Jewish, and nothing particularly Jewish is taught there.

Woman

From A Discourse of the Married and Single Life: Wherein by Discovering the Misery of One, is Plainly Declared the Felicity of the Other by Ionas Man (1621):

Let a man also consider the qualities, wherewith women are indued, which for the most part are opposite to those of men: as, her wantonnesse, to his sobriety; her forwardnesse, to his meekness; her stubornesse, to his patience; her pride, to his humilitie; her lightnesse, to his gravitie; her disliking, to that which he approveth; her covering of which he denieth: wherein they justly resemble the shadow of mans body, which if a man persue, it will runne from him; if he goe away, it will follow him: this is all the comfort that man in his choice can have, that perhaps it may be his fortune, inter malos, non habere pessima: amongst many that are evill, not to light of that which is worst of all.”

Notre Dame Univ

Longtime Notre Dame president Father Theodore Hesburgh used to describe Notre Dame as the place where the Church does its thinking. To outsiders that has always seemed a sign of Notre Dame’s inordinate sense of self-importance.

Camille Paglia

“That in the year 2001 the group chanting of crude four-letter words for female genitalia is viewed as some sort of radical liberation implies that the real issue in The Vagina Monologues isn’t male oppression but bourgeois oppression—the malady of the dainty, decorous professional class.”

Kierkegaard

People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
S�ren Kierkegaard

B Boxer on pregnancy

At one point during the meeting, Boxer said, in reference to pregnant women, "You can talk about it any way you want, but she's carrying a child." A second time she said, "I would just like to state the obvious. When a woman is pregnant, and I was, you're carrying a child and if you protect the pregnant woman, you're protecting that whole entire pregnancy."

Democracy

"... they take alarm at the voice of the majority.
"In that voice it is the people that they hear; it is the people that
they fear; it is democracy that they fear. Is that putting the matter
too strongly? Numerous books and articles in recent years have raised
alarums about an impending "theocracy." It would seem that their
authors are, in fact, alarmed by a democratic discourse in which all
arguments are in play in the deliberation of how we ought to order our
life together". [RJ Neuhaus FIRST THINGS OCT 2008]

Samuelson

Nobel Prize winner Paul A. Samuelson informed readers of his widely used textbook, 'The Soviet economy is proof that ... a socialist command economy can function and even thrive,'"

Mexico

“Mexico is a rich country, with poor people.”

Titus Oates

Titus Oates as a “Catholic conspirator,” but Oates was an Anglican curate, an active homosexual, and a man already convicted of perjury in his native town. He himself later said he only pretended to convert to Catholicism to get a list of Catholic names so as to accuse this persecuted minority in the absurd popish plot (1678–1681)

Clinton

As one of Clinton’s speechwriters recalls, “There is no one who is more easily articulate in my memory, and I can’t remember a thing he said.”

Frances Fitzgerald

For people such as Fitzgerald, politics is “the real world.”

Blind watchman

"My watchmen are blind, all of them unaware; They are all dumb dogs, they cannot bark; ...these are the shepherds which know no discretion; Each of them goes his own way, every one of them to his own gain..." Isaiah 56: 9-11

Sudan

Post-colonial governments, which in the early years had the blessing of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, took vast tracts of land in the name of agricultural development, turning farmers who worked their own land into wage laborers for the state and its allies.

Some Sudanese have even been pushed off their land entirely. In the early 1990s the Nuba people were forced into “peace villages,” where they provided a steady supply of cheap, captive labor to mechanized farms. In other areas, including parts of Darfur, intensive mechanized farming by the government and investors who were heedless to the need to protect the fertility of the land left large tracts barren.

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Semi-Catholic JFK

John F. Kennedy was the first presidential candidate to enunciate the idea that Catholicism might somehow be detrimental toward being a good American. In seeking to distance himself from the dark powers of Rome, he promised that he would always act "in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates. And no power or threat of punishment could cause me to decide otherwise."

Liberals

There is a good reason, though, that liberals are liberals. By and large, they are people who never fully mature and who go through life, like sullen teenagers, resenting figures of authority -- be they police officers, members of the military, teachers who believe in discipline and academic standards in the classroom – people, in short, who have rules and values. These folks started out by resenting their parents, assuming their parents were responsible adults and not aging hippies, the sort of parents who set curfews and expected good grades, parents who objected to their offspring boozing, shacking up and using drugs.

Children

"Psalms 127:3 Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit
of the womb is his reward".

Halifax

“If I had to choose between an immoral celibate clergy and a moral married clergy, I would choose the former.” The Lady was scandalized, but the future Lord Halifax remained firm: “Oh yes, I would” (Lockhart, vol. 1, p. 255).

Malines by Fr. Jaki

This corresponded to the principle quod ab omnibus semper et ubique, given by Vincent of Lerins in the fifth century, a principle as unworkable then as now.

College

As Thomas Sowell has said, most higher education is just expensive insulation from reality.

Eisenhower

Also in Eisenhower's farewell speech
"The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

"Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite".

Calvin

the pulpit had abolished the altar;

Yes

they are the sort who can't take 'yes' for an answer.