France

The bourgeois spirit in France was already too strong to be eliminated and it allied itself with the monarchy and the Gallican church against ultramontane Catholicism and Baroque culture.

French eighteenth-century culture became an open door through which the bourgeois spirit penetrated the closed world of Baroque Catholicism, first as a leaven of criticism and new ideas, and finally as a destructive flood of revolutionary change which destroyed the moral and social foundations of the Baroque culture.

Max Weber's thesis

The bourgeois culture actually developed on Protestant soil, and especially in a Calvinist environment, while the Catholic environment seemed decidedly unfavourable to its evolution...

The bourgeois culture has the mechanical rhythm of a clock, the Baroque the musical rhythm of a fugue or a sonata.

Pharisee

For what is the Pharisee but a spiritual bourgeois, a typically “closed” nature, a man who applies the principle of calculation and gain not to economics but to religion itself, a hoarder of merits, who reckons his accounts with heaven as though God was his banker?

Anti-bourgeois

The antibourgeois temperament, the type of character which naturally prefers to spend rather than to accumulate, to give rather than to gain.

Bourgeois

In short the bourgeois is essentially a moneymaker, at once its servant and its master, and the development of his social ascendancy shows the degree to which civilization, and human life are dominated by the money power.

Heresy

A heresy being a truth that has been exaggerated into falsehood

Nicelings

Sallow-faced nicelings.

Belloc and the Church

Hilaire Belloc: “[The Church is] an institute run with such knavish imbecility that if it were not the work of God it would not last a fortnight.”

Jewish marines

"Why is it," I asked, "that every Jew I know seems to be a Marine, the father of a Marine, or the son of a Marine?"

He didn't skip a beat. "Well, we quickly found out that controlling all the levers of international finance wasn't enough. We needed an elite fighting force to defend it."

Hitler the Liberal

“This new Reich will give its youth to no
one, but will itself take youth and give
to youth its own education and its only
upbringing. Your child belongs to us
already... What are you? You will pass
on. Your descendants, however, now
stand in the new camp. In a short time
they will know nothing else but this new
community.” Adolph Hitler

Avant garde

Senile avant-gardism

Fred Hoyle

"Imagine 10 to the 50th blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik's cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling, of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order."

Reform Judaism 2

The old quip that Reform Judaism consists of the Democratic Party platform with holidays thrown in...

Reform Judaism

The 50th anniversary of Reform's Religious Action Center was not exactly a coincidence. The RAC is the embodiment of the belief by some that the liberal political stands are indistinguishable from Judaism. Much of the RAC's agenda: support for abortion...

Experts

“No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.”-

Beau Brummel on men's clothes

“If people turn to look at you in the street, you are not well dressed…,”

Drinking

Bill(not IB)’s regulars drank like it was their job.

Bankruptcy

“Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.”

Truth and courtesy

"It is better to hold back a truth," said Saint Francis de Sales, "than to speak it ungraciously."

Basil's liver

When the furious governor of Pontus threatened to tear out his liver, Basil, a confirmed invalid, replied suavely, "It is a kind intention. My liver, as at present located, has given me nothing but uneasiness."

Lord, do not forget me

Sir Jacob Astley (a hardy old Cavalier who was both devout and humorous) before the battle of Edgehill: "Oh, Lord, Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me. March on, boys!"

Prince Rupert

What the English Puritans especially resented in Prince Rupert was his insistence on regimental prayers. They could pardon his raids, his breathless charges, his bewildering habit of appearing where he was least expected or desired; but that he should usurp their own especial prerogative of piety was more than they could bear.

Carnal mirth

In the diary of Henry Alline; "On Wednesday the twelfth I preached at a wedding, and had the happiness thereby to be the means of excluding carnal mirth".

Nuns' shoes

Saint Francis de Sales to the nuns who wanted to go barefooted, "Keep your shoes and change your brains".

Academic style

"I know not how it comes to pass," he said, "that professors in most arts and sciences are generally the worst qualified to explain their meaning to those who are not of their tribe."

Courage

Courage is fear that has said its prayers.

Political pusillanimity

No one ever made much of a mistake by overestimating the pusillanimity of the British political class.

J S Mill

Mill’s contention that a father who abandons his children may rightfully be put to forced labor.

Socialism and crime

The Netherlands, with its relatively virtuous Gini coefficient, is one of the most crime-ridden countries in Western Europe, as is Sweden, with an even lower Gini coefficient.

TR on the Senate

As Teddy Roosevelt shot back when an aide recommended he inform the Senate of a secret agreement with Japan, "Why invite the expression of views with which we may not agree?"

Communism

Communism: a state body of favored officials.

U.S. basketball

There were sighs of relief at the prospect there might not be a professional basketball season this year, when the owners and players couldn't get together on how to co-ordinate their greed.