When we talk about things worth dying for; we’re really talking about things worth living for, the things that give life beauty and meaning. Thinking a little about our mortality … helps us see what matters, and also the foolishness of things that, finally, don’t matter.
Two great temptations that I’ve seen people struggle with over my lifetime. The first is to try to create life’s meaning for themselves, which translates in the end to no meaning at all. The second is to live and die for the wrong meaning, the wrong cause, the wrong purpose. The world is full of disguised and treasonous little gods.
Charles J. Chaput, OFM Cap., Things
Worth Dying For
When a slave had nerve enough to go straight to his master, with a well-founded complaint against an overseer, … in the end, the policy of complaining was generally vindicated. The overseer very naturally disliked to have the ear of the master disturbed by complaints, … he generally modified the rigor of his rule after complaints of this kind had been made against him.
And yet these masters would often go beyond their overseers in wanton cruelty. They wielded the lash. They could cripple or kill without fear of consequences.
Frederick Douglass, Life and
Times of Frederick Douglass
The fiction of top-down Government Control, of a Command Economy, is at essence like a Reality Show, which is to say, a fraud. The Good Causes of the Left may generally be compared to NASCAR; they offer the diversion of watching things go excitingly around in a circle, getting nowhere.
David Mamet, the secret knowledge
We are at the end of the American project as the founders intended it. (However) opportunities are opening for preserving the best qualities of the American project in a new incarnation.
By the American project I mean the continuing effort, begun with the founding, to demonstrate that human beings can be left free as individuals, families, and communities to live their lives as they see fit as long as they accord the same freedom to everyone else, with government safe-guarding a peaceful setting for those endeavors but otherwise standing aside.
We are at the end of the American project as the founders intended it. Only remnants remain, and they are reserved for a lucky few.
Charles Murray, Intro to By The People – Rebuilding
Liberty Without Permission
In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
C.S. Lewis, The abolition of Man
Democratic nations are menaced. The supreme power covers the surface with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform. Such a power does not destroy, but it extinguishes, and stupefies people, to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in
America
In the whole of human history there is always only one significant hour- the present. If you want to find eternity, you must serve the times.
Dietrich bonhoeffer
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. Pilate was merciful until it became risky.
C.S. Lewis
Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation.
From Harold Kushner’s forward to
Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning
