Fish on liberalism

"Liberal universalism, with its superficial respect for everyone (as long as everyone is superficial) and its deep respect for no one, can’t do it".

Vince Lombardi

"If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score?"
~Vince Lombardi

TR

"When they call the roll in the Senate, the Senators do not know whether to answer 'Present' or 'Not guilty.'"
~Theodore Roosevelt

Eugenics

Dr. Hannah Stone, a Jewish physician who served as Sanger's clinic director, and wrote in Eugenics, the journal of the American Eugenics Society (AES): "Not to unlimited procreation but rather to controlled propagation based upon a knowledge of the laws of genetics and eugenics must we look for the production of a superior race and a higher intellectual status."

S Fish liberalism

Religious rights “can only be effectively defended pursuant to a specific and distinctly religious framework.” Liberal universalism, with its superficial respect for everyone (as long as everyone is superficial) and its deep respect for no one, can’t do it.

Bishops

Once you become a bishop you never get bad news or a bad meal

M S Winters on the NYT

The friend I consult on environmental matters tells me that when she reads the Times on the subject, she assumes they will get it wrong.

Msgr Knox

Thank God, in these days of enlightenment and establishment, everyone has a right to his own opinions, and chiefly to the opinion, that nobody else has a right to theirs.

Ortega

What the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset called the barbarism of specialization

Broke

The Obama administration has replaced an old axiom, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," with one of its own: "If it ain't broke, fix it till it is." ...

Feminism

the dwindling gloomy band of radical feminists are too busy pouring new whine into old battles to celebrate success.

Habits and hobbies

"When a habit begins to cost money, it's suddenly called a hobby."

Obvious

It takes a high IQ to evade the obvious.

College

College kids are stupid. That's why they're still in college.

Merton

He wrote free verse, tennis without a net,

Eric Hoffer

Years ago the New York longshoreman and philosopher Eric Hoffer noted that every great cause starts off as a movement, becomes a business, and then degenerates into a racket.

Atheism

"The writers against religion, whilst they oppose every system, are wisely careful never to set up any of their own." Burke. A Vindication of Natural Society

I.B.Singer

"When I was a young boy, they called me a liar. Now that I'm all grown up, they call me a writer."

--- Isaac Bashevis Singer

Revel

The European establishment, Revel notes, soft-pedals the fact that Europeans “invented the great criminal ideologies of the twentieth century”; it defangs Communism (at “the top French business school,” students think Stalin’s great error was to “prioritize capital goods over . . . consumer goods”);

Sweden

Indeed, according to a recent study by the Swedish Trade Research Institute, Swedes have a slightly lower standard of living than black Americans

Anti-U.S. idealists

And why have these Machiavellians become idealists? Because they no longer have power —and, being powerless, they resent U.S. power, even when it’s used not to conquer but to help.
Robert Kagan

Hitchens

The moment I heard that Christopher Hitchens’ mother was a Jew who denied her origin in order to make him into “a real English Gentleman”

Parenting and pianos

"Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist."

--- Michael Levine