Maggie's Farm

"Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-state of mind."

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

 "... we must not be surprised if we are in for a rough time. When a man turns to Christ and seems to be getting on pretty well (in the sense that some of his bad habits are now corrected) he often feels that it would not be natural if things went fairly smoothly. When troubles come along - illnesses, money troubles, new kinds of temptation - he is disappointed. These things, he feels, might have been necessary to rouse him and make him repent in his bad old days; but why now? Because God is forcing him on, or up, to a higher level: putting him into situations where he will have to be very much braver, or more patient, or more loving, than he ever dreamed of being before. It seems to us all unnecessary: but that is because we have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us."

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Our struggle is not with Obama or Reid or Pelosi, it is with the system that they advance. A system of unrestricted power that mandates absolute dominance over all human affairs backed by an ideology that treats all human activity as political and in need of control in the name of the greater good. Getting them all out is a plus, but it's a battle, not the war.

Dan Greenfield (Sultan Knish) in Winning the System

Superficiality is only skin deep.

Joseph Wambaugh, in one of his books - I forget which one

"When you subsidize poverty and failure, you get more of both."

James Dale Davidson

"In the place where repentant sinners stand, perfect saints cannot stand."

Talmud

,,,the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearance, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.

Niccolo Machiavelli (h/t Zen)

Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. . . . Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

George Santayana on the modern Liberal, 100 years ago:

 “his ultimate satisfaction in his work is not founded on any good done, but on a passionate willfulness. He calls the thing he wants for others good, because he wants to bestow it on them, not because they naturally want it for themselves. Incapable of sympathy, he has a momentary pleasure in policy.”

As quoted in Bergner's Mugged by Mythology - Liberals believe the darnedest things.

Adolescence, like retirement, is an invention of the modern age. If the extension of retirement into a multi-decade government-funded vacation is largely a function of increased life expectancy, the prolongation of adolescence seems to derive from the bleak fact that, without an efficient societal conveyor belt to move you on, it appears to be the default setting of huge swathes of humanity. It was striking, during the Hurricane Irene frenzy, to hear the Federal Emergency Management Agency refer to itself repeatedly as “the federal family.” If Big Government is a “family,” with the bureaucracy as its parents, why be surprised that the citizens are content to live as eternal adolescents?

Mark Steyn, in A Tale of Two Declines - Even if the economy were to fix itself overnight, we'd still face sincere cultural challenges.

The wise Ray Dalio says we're in decline - a post about that later today.

“The budget must be balanced, the Treasury must be refilled, public debt must be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom must be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands must be curtailed, lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.”

Cicero, 55 B.C., as quoted by Bruce here yesterday

Via Vanderleun:

"The loss of transcendence evokes the flight to utopia. I am convinced that the destruction of transcendence is the actual amputation of human beings from which all other sicknesses flow. Robbed of their real greatness they can only find escape in illusory hopes." 

Benedict XVI

The thief believes that everybody steals.

- Danish aphorism. I cannot spell it in the Danish.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head…Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal ever invented anything so bad as drunkenness – or so good as drink.

G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News 1907, from a selection of Chesterton quotes at Anchoress

A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool.

William Shakespeare 

Going to college offered me the chance to play football for four more years.

Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.

Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves.

I've never been able to understand why a Republican contributor is a 'fat cat' and a Democratic contributor of the same amount of money is a 'public-spirited philanthropist'.

We should measure welfare's success by how many people leave welfare, not by how many are added.

Latinos are Republican. They just don't know it yet.

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!

Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the democrats believe every day is April 15.

The taxpayer - that's someone who works for the federal government but doesn't have to take the civil service examination.

The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jellybeans.

"The government drag on the economy is the Net Present Value of expenditures minus transfer payments" - 1st year MBA Macro Econ

A reader

Catholics keep talking about “calling,” and asking people to stop yakking about what they “deserve” long enough to seriously ask, “Is it truly for me? Is it what I am called to? Is there a possibility that I am not supposed to have this, in order to open my life up to something else? What might that be? Am I being led somewhere I had not imagined?”

The Anchoress

Doctors are men who prescribe medicines of which they know little, to cure diseases of which they know less, in human beings of whom they know nothing.

Voltaire