Lawyers' fees

One law firm that recently collapsed, Heller Ehrman, was hurt in part because a number of cases had settled.

Voltaire & Rousseau

After reading Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality in 1755, Voltaire wrote to him, "I have received, Monsieur, your new book against the human race.... It makes one desire to go down on all fours." Five years later, Rousseau wrote to Voltaire. "Monsieur,...I hate you

Dulles

As a matter of further fact, Dulles had about the same time, in his capacity as president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, made a memorable address on why many, if not most, academic Catholic theologians were no longer doing Catholic theology as he understood that task.

B Russell

As Bertrand Russel said "People are not born stupid, but ignorant;
it is education that makes them stupid."

GM Hopkins tr, of Adoro te devote

What God’s Son has told me, take for truth I do;
Truth Himself speaks truly or there’s nothing true.

aquinas

St. Thomas confronts other creeds of good and evil, without at all denying evil, with a theory of two levels of good. The supernatural order is the supreme good, as for any Eastern mystic; but the natural order is good; as solidly good as it is for any man in the street. That is what "settles the Manichees."

Aquinas

The Blessed Virgin appeared to Aquinas, comforting him with the welcome news that he would never be a Bishop.

Stem cell [non-benefits]

California stem-cell initiative: no cures, few jobs
Approved by voters in 2004, California’s $3 billion embryonic stem-cell initiative has produced no cures and few jobs. Proponents had predicted the initiative would create 10,000 new jobs in its first five years; the largest company in the state that engages in such research, however, has 140 employees. . . .

Sanger

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, certainly was:

"[Our objective is] unlimited sexual gratification without the burden of unwanted children..."

"We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all."

Huxley & Soapy Sam

There is no record of it in the proceedings of the society that held the debate, and Darwin’s friend Joseph Hooker who informed him about the debate said that Huxley made no rejoinder to Wilberforce’s arguments.

Jewish Hail Mary

When the converso bishop of Burgos, Alonso de Cartagena, prayed the Hail Mary, he would say with pride, "Holy Mary, Mother of God and my blood relative, pray for us sinners"

Jews in Spain

Indeed, Spain was the most diverse and tolerant place in medieval Europe. England expelled all of its Jews in 1290. France did the same in 1306. Yet in Spain Jews thrived at every level of society.

Emancipation Proclamation

The hypocrisy of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation came in for heavy criticism. His Secretary of State William Seward said, "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free." The New York World wrote, "He has proclaimed emancipation only where he has notoriously no power to execute it.

O W Holmes, jr.

Of Holmes, TR said, "Out of a banana I could carve a firmer backbone."

Typos

“I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deson’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig.”

John Cogley

Before he died in 1976, Cogley [editor of Commonweal] joined the Episcopal Church, believing that there he could live a lower-case catholicism free of the cumbersome burden of authority.

Love

Love, of which the great mystics made a most divine and even terrible secret, has become a most dreary and vulgar platitude.

Collecting

eBay turns collecting into shopping.

Ah politicians

President-elect Barack Obama's choice to run the Treasury Department and lead the economic rescue effort disclosed publicly Tuesday that he failed to pay $34,000 in taxes from 2001 to 2004, a last-minute complication in an otherwise smooth path to confirmation.

Timothy Geithner

The homosexual "bishop"

As for himself, Robinson said he doesn't yet know what he'll say, but he knows he won't use a Bible.

"While that is a holy and sacred text to me, it is not for many Americans," Robinson said. "I will be careful not to be especially Christian in my prayer. This is a prayer for the whole nation."

Lawyers

99 percent of lawyers give the rest a bad name.

Old Left

The old Lefties in my Local were family guys with plenty of kids. they actually liked children more than cats, dogs and vegetables!

Grammar lesson

Chicago Public School English Class...

Teacher - What comes at the end of a sentence ?

Student - You make an appeal

Money

If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the
people he gave it to.

Tribal life

There's long been a fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems within a ring fence, beyond critiques founded in our own culture: “theirs” and therefore best for “them”; authentic and of intrinsically equal worth to ours.

I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours; and that it suppresses individuality. People think collectively; first in terms of the community, extended family and tribe. This rural-traditional mindset feeds into the “big man” and gangster politics of the African city: the exaggerated respect for a swaggering leader, and the (literal) inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition.

Anxiety - fear of evil spirits, of ancestors, of nature and the wild, of a tribal hierarchy, of quite everyday things - strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought. Every man has his place and, call it fear or respect, a great weight grinds down the individual spirit, stunting curiosity. People won't take the initiative, won't take things into their own hands or on their own shoulders.

Christianity, post-Reformation and post-Luther, with its teaching of a direct, personal, two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective, and unsubordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosphical/spiritual framework I've just described. It offers something to hold on to to those anxious to cast off a crushing tribal groupthink. That is why and how it liberates.

Lawyers

“Lawyers should never marry other lawyers. This is called inbreeding, from which comes idiot children and more lawyers.”

New Year

Enver Hoxha's New Year's message to the Albanian people in 1967. "This year will be harder than last year. It will, however, be easier than next year."

Israel

If the Hamas put down its arms, there would be no more war. If Israel put down her arms, there would be no more Israel.

Max Planck

“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”

Actual work

"Normally what I would do is post a résumé on CareerBuilder or Craigslist and I would have recruiters calling me left and right," he said. "These days finding a job is actual work. It's a full-time job."

John Chrysostom on bishops

The floor of hell is paved with the skulls of bishops.

…St. John Chrysostom

Paranoia

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't really out to get
you. It is a tough world.

Lincoln

"Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing."

-- Abraham Lincoln

Algren

Nelson Algren once said that every movement begins as a cause, becomes a business and ends up as a racket.

War

George Orwell once quipped, "The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it."