Quotes 8 Mar 18

Children love fat mothers. They like them because while any mother is a diagram of place, a picture of home, a atone is a clearer diagram, a greater sacrament. She is more there. I can think of to better wish to all the slender swans of this present age, than to propose them a toast: May your husbands find your s slim as they like; your children should always remember you were fat. - Robert Farrar Capon, Bed and Board, p 66

A wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar [i.e., Muhammad] … spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. … He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE [Adam's capitalization] …While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men.- air to John Quincy Adams

“That a camel-merchant [Muhammad] … delivers his country to iron and flame; that he cuts the throats of fathers and kidnaps daughters; that he gives to the defeated the choice of his religion or death: this is assuredly nothing any man can excuse.”-  Voltaire

“There was to be no nonsense about toleration” in Islam, wrote Shaw in a 1933 letter. “You accepted Allah or you had your throat cut by someone who did accept him, and who went to Paradise for having sent you to Hell.”- George Bernard Shaw

The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. … The influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.-Winston Churchill

Quotes 7 Mar 18

Fathers provoke not your children to wrath ....Develop a passion for fairness. It you overdo anything, make it that. - Robert Farrar Capon, Bed and Board, p 61

Civilizations die of suicide, not by murder. --Arnold J. Toynbee (1889-1975) _A Study Of History_ [1954]

As I wrote in my book The Crisis Behind Our Crisis, “We have replaced religion with (at best)
religionism, freedom with liberty, wisdom with cleverness, sentiment with sentimentality, justice
with legalism, art with pickled animals, music with amplified noise, statecraft with politicking,
love with sex, communication with sound bytes, self-confidence with effrontery, equality before God
with levelling, respect for others with political correctness – in short, everything real with
virtual caricatures.” And, I might have added, pleasure with drunken oblivion.
--Alexander Boot, Look what progress throws up.  http://www.alexanderboot.com/look-what-progress-throws-up/

I think in one of my previous lives I was a mighty king, because I like people to do what I say. --Jack Handey (1949-    )  _Deep Thoughts_ [1992]

Look back and smile on perils past. -Walter Scott

Quotes 6 Mar 18

Justin Welby said the Islamic rules are incompatible with Britain’s laws, which have developed over 500 years on the principles of a different culture....He said yesterday in advance of publication that British law has ‘underlying values and assumptions’ that come from a clearly Christian tradition. ‘Sharia law is not just about punishments,’ he added. ‘It is something of immense sophistication, but it comes from a very different background of jurisprudence to the one from which British law has developed over the past 500 years’....The problem is reimagining Britain through values applied in action can only work where the narrative of the country is coherent and embracing.’ The Archbishop said: ‘Sharia, which has a powerful and ancient cultural narrative of its own, deeply embedded in a system of faith and understanding of God, and thus especially powerful in forming identity, cannot become part of another narrative.‘Accepting it in part implies accepting its values around the nature of the human person, attitudes to outsiders, the revelation of God, and a basis for life in law, rather than grace, the formative word of Christian culture.’-http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5428849/Welby-Islamic-rules-incompatible-British-laws.html

With every new sunrise there is a new chance.
But with every sunset, you blew it.
     --Jack Handey (1946-    )
      _The Lost Deep Thoughts_ [1998]

We are what we are today in Jesus Christ because God has a plan. It's not something uncertain. It's not something wistful. It's not some fleeting thing. It is a sure thing—a definite thing that goes back into eternity.-Derek Thomas@DerekWHThomas

Progress: The process whereby the human race has got
rid of whiskers, the vermiform appendix, and God.
     --H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
      _A Book of Burlesques_ [1916]

Father's day is a joke and a commercially motivated one at that. - Robert Farrar Capon, Bed and Board, p 58

Quotes 3 Mar 18

...the Bible does not say that men and women are unequal. Neither does the church. There are no second class citizens in the New Jerusalem. It is husbands and wives that are unequal. It is precisely in marriage (a state, you will recall, not to be continued as such in heaven) that they enter into a relationship of superior to inferior,- of head to a body. And the difference there is not one of worth, ability to intelligence, but of role. It is functional not organic.It is based on the exigencies of the Dance not on a judgement as to talent.In the ballet, in any intricate dance, one dancer leads, the other follows. Not because one is better (he may or may not be), but because that is his part. Our mistake here, as elsewhere, is to think that equality and diversity are irreconcilable. The common notion of equality is based on the image of the march. In a parade, really unequal beings are dressed alike, given guns of identical length, trained to hold them at the same angle, and ordered to keep step with a fixed beat. But it is not the parade that is true to life, it is the dance. There you have real equals assigned unequal roles in order that each may achieve his individual perfection in the whole. Nothing is less personal than a parade; nothing more so than a dance. It is the choice image of fulfillment through function, and it comes very close to the heart of the Trinity. Marriage is a hierarchical game played bu co-equal persons.Keep that paradox and you move in the freedom of the Dance; alter, and you grow weary with marching. - - Robert Farrar Capon, Bed and Board, p 53-54.

"Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make 

sense." "Grandpa Jones" - Hee-Haw tv show. 

Asked who was worse, Rousseau or Voltaire, Dr. Johnson is said (at least apocryphally) to have replied: “Sir, it is not for me to apportion the degree of iniquity between a louse and a flea.” I think it’s pretty much the same regarding Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. 

-- Roger Kimball, Thoughts on the RNC Convention, #1 

https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2016/07/19/thoughts-on-the-rnc-convention-1/ 

Dr. Johnson said no such thing. When James Boswell asked him if he thought Rousseau was "as bad a man as Voltaire," Johnson replied: "Why, Sir, it is difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them." See: Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), vol. 1, p. 278. In 1783, however, Johnson did say this about two run-of-the-mill British poets, Samuel Derrick and Christopher Smart: "Sir, there is no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea."  

I hope life isn't a big joke, because I don't get it. 

     --Jack Handey (1949-    ) 

      _Deeper Thoughts_ [1993] 

Quotes 5 Mar 18

...it is husbands who have done the most damage. , and it is they, who can if they will, do the most good. If the train doesn't move , repair the locomotive. Don't let the cars sit around blaming themselves for not being engines. Above all, don't let them try to act as if they were. For the cars have their own function, they are what the train is really about.They are what the engine is for.All the space in a husband is supposed to be given over to providing traction; it is the wife's capacity for freight that makes the trip worthwhile. The comparison is hardly flattering, but it does manage to be a bit gallant and, and as a husband, I am rather pleased that I was able to get it off. One should try to practice what one preaches, with or without elegance. - Robert Farrar Capon, Bed and Board, p 57

Lofty words do not make a man just or holy; but 

a good life makes him dear to God.  I would far 

rather feel contrition than be able to define it. 

     --Thomas A' Kempis (1380-1471) 

      _The Imitation Of Christ_ [c. 1420]; Book 1, Chapter 1 

I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world 

without hate.  And I can picture us attacking that 

world, because they'd never expect it. 

     --Jack Handey (1949-    ) 

      _Deepest Thoughts_ [1994] 

If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute 

thing to tell him is "God is crying." 

And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to 

tell him is "Probably because of something you did." - unk

“Those who do not eat before they understand the entire process by which food arrives at their table will starve to death..those who do not want to believe the Word of God before they see all their problems resolved will die of spiritual starvation” Bavinck

Quotes 2 Mar 18

For a nun's life of course is utterly sexual....Of course, she omits as an offering to God, one particular expression of her sexuality; but it is only one out of a hundred. The sexual congress she does not attend is not life's most important meeting, all the marriage manuals to the contrary notwithstanding. - Robert Farrar Capon, Bed and Board, p 49

Very soon the end of your life will be at hand: consider, 

therefore, the state of your soul.  Today a man is here; 

tomorrow he is gone. . . . 

You should order your every deed and thought, as though today 

were the day of your death.  Had you a good conscience, death 

would hold no terrors for you. --Thomas A' Kempis (1380-1471) 

      _The Imitation Of Christ_ [c. 1420]; Book 1, Chapter 23 

Just as the soil needs cultivators of the soil, the mind needs teachers. But teachers are not as easy to come by as farmers. The teachers themselves are pupils and must be pupils. But there cannot be an infinite regress: ultimately there must be teachers who are not in turn pupils. Those teachers who are not in turn pupils are the great minds or, in order to avoid any ambiguity in a matter of such importance, the greatest minds. Such men are extremely rare. We are not likely to meet any of them in any classroom. We are not likely to meet any of them anywhere. It is a piece of good luck if there is a single one alive in one's time. For all practical purposes, pupils, of whatever degree of proficiency, have access to the teachers who are not in turn pupils, to the greatest minds, only through the great books. Liberal education will then consist in studying with the proper care the great books which the greatest minds have left behind -- a study in which the more experienced pupils assist the less experienced pupils, including the beginners. 

-- Leo Strauss, graduation speech at University of Chicago, June 6, 1959, 

When you have arrived at that state when trouble 

seems sweet and acceptable to you for Christ's 

sake, then all is well with you, for you have found 

paradise upon earth. 

But so long as suffering is grievous to you and 

you seek to escape it, so long will it go ill with 

you, for the trouble you try to escape will 

pursue you everywhere. --Thomas A' Kempis (1380-1471) 

      _The Imitation Of Christ_ [c. 1420]; Book 2, Chapter 12 

Everyone can master a grief but he that has it. 

     --William Shakespeare (1564-1616) 

      _Much Ado About Nothing_ [1598-1600]; 

       Act III, Scene II, Line 26 

       http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/much_3_2.html 

Quotes ! Mar 18

About sex especially men are born mad; and they hardly reach sanity until they reach sanctity.- G K Chesterton quoted in - Robert Farrar Capon, Bed and Board, p 48

Not one drop of rain falls without God’s sure command.-@JohnCalvinDaily

 John Calvin

Tell me, where now are all the masters and teachers 

whom you knew so well in life and who were famous 

for their learning?  Others have already taken their 

places and I know not whether they ever think of 

their predecessors.  During life they seemed to be 

something; now they are seldom remembered. 

How quickly the glory of the world passes away!  If 

only their lives had kept pace with their learning, 

then their study and reading would have been worth 

while. --Thomas A' Kempis (1380-1471) 

      _The Imitation Of Christ_ [c. 1420]; Book 1, Chapter 3 

       http://www.ccel.org/ccel/kempis/imitation.ONE.3.html 

There is frequently more to be learned from the 

unexpected questions of a child than the discourses 

of men, who talk in a road, according to the notions 

they have borrowed and the prejudices of their 

education. 

     --John Locke (1632-1704) 

      _Some Thoughts Concerning Education_ [1693], Section 121 

I suspect that the child plucks its first flower 

with an insight into its beauty and significance 

which the subsequent botanist never retains. 

     --Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) 

      _Journal_ [February 5, 1852]