Expenditures

"Congress does not always act on authorizations that are put into legislation by drafters," explained Kenneth Baer, a spokesman for the White House budget agency. "Authorizations for discretionary spending are not expenditures."

Our Bishops

"These silly men," Hewitt complains, "issued reams of nonsense and met and met and met even as the liturgy collapsed into incoherence and the preaching dissolved into eight-minute homilies on the need for love. There was also the problem of the Responsorial Antiphon. It would almost always cause me to either laugh or grind my teeth. Is there a worse collection of 'music' anywhere? And the Christian Rite of Initiation, and the revamped Sacrament of Reconciliation -- all of it just another set of committee reports from priests and nuns bored with the old Church. I could go on, but my guess is that you have heard it all before."

Los Angeles cathedral

Hewitt points to the cathedral in Los Angeles as "the perfect expression of the American Church today -- so sterile it could be an air conditioning plant and designed to please non-Catholics with the taste of the leadership."

Grayling

INDUSTRIAL-STYLE authorship of this kind is a triumph of the will rather than a display of intelligence. The effect is one of wearisome repetition, and one wonders what Grayling imagines he has achieved by the exercise.

Santayana on Russell

George Santayana, a thinker of insight and subtlety (these days much neglected), summed up Russell’s predilections perfectly: “His radical solutions were rendered vain by the conventionality of his problems. His outlook was universal, but his presuppositions were insular.”

John Gray

SEEING THEMSELVES as fiercely independent thinkers, bien-pensants are remarkable chiefly for the fervor with which they propagate the prevailing beliefs of their time. Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill’s godson and a scion of one of England’s great political dynasties, exemplified this contradiction throughout most of his life. British philosopher A. C. Grayling can now be counted amongst his number.

Kolakovski

He dismissed the idea of democratic socialism as "contradictory as a fried snowball",