Jobs

If all we want are jobs, we can create any number -- for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again.

Yes and no

Yes is no good unless a no is possible.

Rabbi Sacks

"Therefore the answer to the consumer society is the world of faith, which the Jews call the world of Shabbat, where you can’t shop and you can’t spend and you spend your time with things that matter, with family".

Gompers on socialism

“Socialism has no place in the hearts of those who would secure the fight for freedom and preserve democracy.” Samuel Gompers, 1918

American women

Not one single American woman has EVER condemned their fellow American women for committing these crimes against men. Silence means consent. Therefore, American women support and enjoy destroying men’s lives and causing men to commit suicide. Therefore, is it any surprise that a huge percent of American men no longer want anything to do with American women, other than using them for easy sex and then throwing them away?

Over 50 percent of American women are single, without a boyfriend or husband; so the fact is most American men no longer want to marry American women. Let these worthless American women grow old living alone with their 10 cats.

Religion and social justice

Could it be that people don’t need to attend churches in order to tackle problems like poverty, hunger, and housing? Is it possible that people attend churches for entirely different reasons

USCCB

One does get the impression that the staff of the U.S. Catholic Conference and the diocesan chanceries are bureaucratic perpetual motion machines which operate without much in the way of a mind.

Cure d'Ars

The Cure de Ars once said: "leave a village for twenty years without a priest -- and they'll be praying to animals."

Power

Shelley said that power “pollutes whate’er it touches.”

Men of the year

Time named Man of the Year long ago, Stalin in 1942, Hitler in 1938.

Impartiality

It may appear paradoxical, but it is exceedingly practical. We must be not so much impartial as partial to both sides.

French liberty

At the time, the French right opposed foreign adventures. The French left were the ones who advocated imperialism as part of their Jacobin legacy. Occupying faraway places was an extension of what Robespierre and his friends had begun in 1793 by invading and “liberating” France’s neighbors.

Emma Goldman

The descendant of an old New York Sephardic family, Miss Emma drew the line with German Jews, who might create problems if one tried to assimilate too many of them.

Persons

When a nation ceases to put the highest value on the home, it will not be long before it ceases to put a value on a person.

Fall of Empire

In 150 B.C. Polybius, in writing about the decline of Greece, said: “For the evil of depopulation grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting our attention, by our men becoming perverted to a passion of show and money, and pleasure of an evil life, and accordingly either not marrying at all, or if they did marry, refusing to rear children that were born, or at most, one or two out of the great numbers, for the sake of leaving their well-being assured, and bringing them up in extravagant luxury. The result, houses are left heirless, and like swarms of flies, little by little, the cities become sparsely inhabited and weak.”

Slavery

We came, before the Church was founded, out of a pagan social system in which slavery was everywhere, in which the whole structure of society reposed upon the institution of Slavery. With the loss of the Faith we return to that institution again.

Unemployment

Under full Communism there would be no unemployment, just as there is no unemployment in a prison.

The State

"the State," but what is in practice a body of favored officials.

Seneca

As Seneca once told Lucilius: ”No wonder there is so much sickness. Look at all the cooks!”

Dilution

diluted Christians

Leonardo

Leonardo spent nearly 20 years in Milan, arriving at the court of Ludovico Maria Sforza in 1482 and skedaddling as soon as his patron was deposed in 1499. A despot’s court was obviously the perfect environment for the original Renaissance Man.

College children

Occupy Wall Street encampments across the country. The bulk of their complaint seems to be that it is somehow unfair that the creature comforts of campus life should ever come to an end

Kierkegaard

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

Commentating

Brokaw stands as the last of the respected "voice of God" news anchors.

Gandhi's India

India, the result of Gandhi, is 600 million people living in maximum poverty.

Verbicide

Verbicide precedes homicide.

Tenderness

Flannery O'Connor's warning that tenderness leads to the gas chambers.

Modern church

I never imagined that I would grow up to become a priest in the Church of What’s Happening Now, a.k.a. The Episcopal Church.

Merton on Progressive Catholics

Merton put the complaint about progressive Catholicism and its furies about as well as it can be put in one of the “nonsense letters” he wrote to his old friend, the poet Robert Lax: “I am truly spry and full of fun, but am pursued by the vilifications of progressed Catholics. Mark my word man there is no uglier species on the face of the earth than progressed Catholics, mean, frivol, ungainly, inarticulate, venomous, and bursting at the seams with progress into the secular cities and Teilhardian subways. The Ottavianis was bad but these are infinitely worse. You wait and see.”

Theory and practice

“Theory is when you understand everything, but nothing works.”
“Practice is when everything works, but nobody understands why.”

Oh dear, Oh dear

Liturgy of the Wringing of the Hands