NEH

The National Endowment for the Inanities.

GKC on labor leaders

What is the matter with these highly honourable men is that they trust their education more than their experience... They prefer the long words that stand for theories to the short words that stand for things. [ILNA 2 Oct 1920]

Hot water

Chesterton wrote: “I believe in getting into hot water. It keeps you clean.”

Mein Kampus

Is Mein Kampus a more descriptive term for many colleges in America today?

Jules Renard

He’s a good shot. Here’s a bull’s eye—“Victor Hugo. His landslides of verse.” Here’s another terse literary judgment: “With men like Chateaubriand and Lamartine you travel in the air, but without direction.” Ouch.

Renard doesn’t only aim his arrows at others. He observes his own vanity as a writer. A reminder to himself—“You may write as few books as you like: People will persist in not knowing them all.” And he judges himself a slacker: “I live in laziness as in a prison.” It’s the curse of all writers: Somebody else is always publishing. But Renard can be droll about himself, as in this observation: “Laziness: the habit of resting before fatigue sets in.” And he can be clever, making a bargain with time, that cruel taskmaster: “The sun rises before I do, but I go to bed after it does: We are even.” He can even outwit himself: “It’s many a day since I’ve felt ashamed of my vanity, or even tried to correct it. Of all my faults, it is the one that amuses me the most.”

Ellis on war

“Men were made for war. Without it they wandered greyly about, getting under the feet of the women, who were trying to organize the really important things of life.”

Ellis on feminism

She was impatient with feminism, pointing out that any woman who could cook could also poison.

Alice Thomas Ellis on her dead son

"The Birds of the Air

All his beauty, wit and grace
Lie forever in one place.
He who sang and sprang and moved
Now, in death, is only loved".

Lukewarm in our loyalties

Let us be lukewarm in our loyalties so that we will be soft in our hatreds. If nothing is worth fighting for, then nobody will fight. R.R.Reno

Souter on abortion

David Souter’s sorry argument that it would be wrong to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision because so many people had planned their lives and careers around it, by which he meant that abortion facilitates a lifestyle.
This is scant progress from Calhoun’s argument in favor of slavery on essentially the same grounds.

Jesuits

Asked about the feeling many have that the Jesuits “look down upon other orders,” Father Nicolas said, “This is a weakness we have and it is quite common".

Harvard

Civic illiteracy in the United States crosses all educational lines, including the vaunted Harvard where, according to the ISI survey, seniors scored 69.56 on the test, or a D-plus. And they were the best.

Cardinal Stafford

"[Obama's] rhetoric is post-modernist, and marks an agenda and vision that are aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic".

Insufficient funds

Dear Sirs,

In view of what seems to be happening internationally with banks at
the moment, I was wondering if you could advise me about the
following:
If one of my checks is returned marked "insufficient funds," how do
I know whether that refers to me or to you?

Confused Citizen

Santayana

The mind of the Renaissance was not a pilgrim mind, but a sedentary city mind, like that of the ancients.
George Santayana

Vice President

characterized by Benjamin Franklin as ‘Your Superfluous Excellency’.

Fr. Reese

“Why am I not surprised?" joked one bishop about Reese’s comments, speaking on a condition of anonymity to CNA.

"Fr. Reese is a mainstream media darling, but the truth is that he has very little knowledge of what goes on (in the episcopate) and far less influence,” he added.

Newspapers

'If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do
read the newspaper you are misinformed.'
Mark Twain

Sexual crimes

Fr. John Coughlin’s excellent review (“Scandal and Canon Law,” June/July 2008) of Nicholas Cafardi’s equally excellent book Before Dallas: The U.S. Bishops’ Response to Clergy Sexual Abuse of Children is marred by approval of setting aside “prescription,” the statute of limitations for the prosecution of a delict in canon law. Coughlin asserted that prescription rendered canon law ineffective for the prosecution of accused clerics because “victims of child abuse sometimes do not bring accusations to the attention of church authorities until many decades after the abuse has occurred.” This is a mantra chanted often in the media by self-serving contingency lawyers and victim groups, but the claim lacks both context and proof.

The prison where I have lived for the last fourteen years houses some 2,500 prisoners, 40 percent of whom are convicted of sexual crimes—most against children. That translates into a population of some one thousand sexual offenders in this single prison, with another six thousand in the state’s parole system. Two of these are Catholic priests, one accused three months after a series of claimed assaults and the other accused of an assault from twenty-seven years ago.

The other 6,998 are accused parents, grandparents, step-parents, uncles, teachers, ministers, scout leaders, and so on, and for them the typical time lapse between alleged abuse and a victim coming forward to report it was measured in weeks or months, or years—certainly not decades. There is simply no evidence to support Coughlin’s contention that sexual-abuse victims typically require decades to come forward.

So what sets the accusers of priests apart from other victims? The John Jay Report revealed that a full 70 percent of the claimants against Catholic priests came forward not in the 1960s to 1980s, when the abuse was claimed to have occurred, but in 2002, when Church institutions were forced into “blanket settlements.”

Before the Church abandons the rule of law in favor of the cascade of media bias, much more study of the relation between settlements and claims is needed. Financial settlement appears to be the sole common denominator that sets claims against priests apart from most other claims. As Archbishop Charles Chaput has asserted elsewhere in the pages of First Things, “statutes of limitations exist in legal systems to promote justice, not hinder it.”

Rev. Gordon MacRae
Hampton, New Hampshir

Homosexuality

It is frequently observed that male homosexuals in particular tend to be predatory; since they cannot procreate, they must recruit.

Jewish telegram

Our friend Midge Decter once described the typical Jewish telegram: “Start worrying. Letter to follow.”

Fashion

fleeing from the grave embarrassment of being fashionable.

John Adams

*On July 3, 1776, John Adams said:
*
"It may be the will of Heaven that America shall suffer calamities still
more wasting and distresses yet more dreadful. If this is to be the
case, it will have this good effect, at least: it will inspire us with
many virtues, which we have not, and correct many errors, follies, and
vices, which threaten to disturb, dishonor, and destroy us. The furnace
of affliction produces refinement, in states as well as individuals.
And the new governments we are assuming, in every part, will require a
purification from our vices, and an augmentation of our virtues or there
will be no blessings....But I must submit all my hopes and fears to an
overruling Providence; in which, unfashionable as faith may be, I firmly
believe."

Family

It is necessary to go back to seeing the family as the sanctuary of life. [John Paul II]

Mencken

Never forget the words of H.L. Mencken, “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it".

Mr. Biden

Moreover, this is a long-standing pattern with Biden. When he was running
for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination back in 1987, someone in
the audience asked him what law school he attended and how well he did.

Flashing his special phony smile, Biden said, "I think I have a much higher
IQ than you do." He added, "I went to law school on a full academic
scholarship" and "ended up in the top half" of the class.

But Biden did not have a full academic scholarship. Newsweek reported: "He
went on a half scholarship based on need. He didn't finish in the 'top half'
of his class. He was 76th out of 85."

Mr. Obama by Thomas Sowell

The kind of self-righteous self-confidence that has become Obama's trademark
is usually found in sophomores in Ivy League colleges-- very bright and
articulate students, utterly untempered by experience in the real world.

Democracy

Democracy: The state of affairs in which you consent to having your pocket picked, and elect the best man to do it.

~Benjamin Lichtenberg

Wisdom of Solomon

A worried woman went to her gynecologist and said:

'Doctor, I have a serious problem and desperately need your help! My baby is not even 1 yr. old and I'm pregnant again. I don't want kids so close together.' So the doctor said: 'Ok, and what do you want me to do?' She said: 'I want you to end my pregnancy, and I'm counting on your help with this.' The doctor thought for a little, and after some silence he said to the lady: 'I think I have a better solution for your problem. It's less dangerous for you too.' She smiled, thinking that the doctor was going to accept her request.

Then he continued: 'You see, in order for you not to have to take care of 2 babies at the same time, let's kill the one in your arms. This way, you could rest some before the other one is born. If we're going to kill one of them, it doesn't matter which one it is. There would be no risk for your body if you chose the one in your arms.

The lady was horrified and said: 'No doctor! How terrible! It's a crime to kill a child!

'I agree', the doctor replied. 'But you seemed to be ok with it, so I thought maybe that was the best solution.' He smiled, realizing that he had made his point.

Keys to the city

"Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks."

Eleazar

Eleazar, though ninety years of age, bravely preferred to die a most glorious death than to purchase a hateful life by violating the law which forbade to the Israelite the use of swine's flesh. His friends, "moved with wicked pity", were willing to substitute lawful flesh, that Eleazar, feigning to have eaten the forbidden meat, might be delivered from death. But, considering "the dignity of his age … and the inbred honour of his grey head", Eleazar spurned this well-meant proposal, which if accepted, though securing his deliverance from punishment, might scandalize many young persons, and could not deliver from the hand of the Almighty. Having thus changed into rage the rejected sympathy of his friends, the holy man bravely endured his cruel torture, probably at Antioch, during the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. (2 Maccabees 6:18-31; 1 Maccabees 1:57-63)