Quotable

"The problem on the left is, now that Karl Marx has forsaken them, they have no philosophy. Thank goodness. Think what evil creeps liberals would be if their plans to enfeeble the individual, exhaust the economy, impede the rule of law, and cripple national defense were guided by a coherent ideology instead of smug ignorance"
(P.J.O'Rourke)

Quote of the Day

"A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials, heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine, desert us when troubles thicken around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts." — Washington Irving (h/t Booker Rising)

A Mother

"A mother is the most important person on earth. She cannot claim the honor of having built Notre Dame Cathedral. She need not. She has built something more magnificent than any Cathedral -- a dwelling for an immortal soul, the tiny perfection of her baby's body".

( Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty)

Economic Collapse linked to Moral Decay

An essay by Stephen Gray gives us something to think about:

“History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse, or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster.”(Douglas MacArthur)



Oh, but if only we WOULD learn from history! I think I'll choose... um...Spiritual Awakening!


"My mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that light was wherein it was bathed... And thus, with the flash of one hurried glance, it attained to the vision of That Which Is."
(Saint Augustine)

Farewell Fidel

“Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.”

(John Derbyshire)

What Is Drudgery?

While re-reading the book "Holiness for Housewives"by Dom Hubert van Zeller, I was reminded of an excellent G.K.Chesterton quote from the chapter ' The Emancipation of Domesticity' in his book "What's Wrong with the World."

"...I cannot, with the utmost energy of imagination, conceive what they mean. When domesticity, for instance, is called drudgery...the difficulty arises from a double meaning in the word. If 'drudgery' only means dreadfully hard work, I admit the woman drudges in the home - as a man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if it means that the hard work is more heavy because it is trifling, colourless and of small import to the soul, then, as I say, I give it up; I do not know what the words mean. To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours, and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, books, cakes, and boots; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene, I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious; but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness."

Quote of the Day

"People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as some thing heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. "

(G.K.Chesterton, Orthodoxy)

Quote of the Day

"Real freedom, concrete freedom, the freedom that can actually be defined, claimed, and granted, was not the opposite of obedience but its other side.
The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy."

- Roger Scruton

Quote of the Day

Today is the Conversion of St.Paul. “Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, [love] is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7).

TO BE OR NOT TO BE...

"Maybe people are led to think, the Church will change its position on this or that or the other thing. The 'maybes' of conditionality produce conditional Catholics ,and conditional Catholics are deprived of the joys of unqualified discipleship."
--Richard John Neuhaus, "To propose the Truth: The Catholic Moment Requires Five Transformations", Crisis, April 1994.

(Neuhaus publishes 'First Things' a bi-monthly forum magazine.http://www.firstthings.com/)