“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.” ― Kurt Vonnegut

“That’s what is was to be young — to be enthusiastic rather than envious about the good work other people could do.” ― Kurt Vonnegut

“Yes, my heart is happy here (I must admit though, for those who do not know me well, that I am always happy wherever I am and that I find the people I am with at the present moment always the most beautiful.” – Jean Vanier

“And were my faith so strong that it could move mountains, that is the mountain that I would make come to me.” — Isak Dinesen

“For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, but it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open windows and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

“God has given to men all that is necessary for them to accomplish their destinies. He has provided a social form as well as a human form. And these social organs of persons are so constituted that they will develop themselves harmoniously in the clean air of liberty. Away, then, with quacks and organizers! A way with their rings, chains, hooks, and pincers! Away with their artificial systems! Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations! And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.” – Frederic Bastiat

“I said that no party held the privilege of dictating to me how I should vote. That if party loyalty was a form of patriotism, I was no patriot, and that I didn’t think I was much of a patriot anyway, for oftener than otherwise what the general body of Americans regarded as the patriotic course was not in accordance with my views; that if there was any valuable difference between being an American and a monarchist it lay in the theory that the American could decide for himself what is patriotic and what isn’t; whereas the king could dictate the monarchist’s patriotism for him—a decision which was final and must be accepted by the victim; that in my belief I was the only person in the sixty millions—with Congress and the Administration back of the sixty million—who was privileged to construct my patriotism for me.

They said ‘Suppose the country is entering upon a war—where do you stand then? Do you arrogate to yourself the privilege of going your own way in the matter, in the face of the nation?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that is my position. If I thought it an unrighteous war I would say so. If I were invited to shoulder a musket in that cause and march under that flag, I would decline. I would not voluntarily march under this country’s flag, nor any other, when it was my private judgment that the country was in the wrong. If the country obliged me to shoulder the musket I could not help myself, but I would never volunteer. To volunteer would be the act of a traitor to myself, and consequently traitor to my country. If I refused to volunteer, I should be called a traitor, I am well aware of that—but that would not make me a traitor. The unanimous vote of the sixty millions could not make me a traitor. I should still be a patriot, and, in my opinion, the only one in the whole country.'” – Mark Twain

“Some absolutely want to make me a party man and I am not; I am given passions and I have only opinions, or rather I have only one passion, the love of liberty and human dignity. In my view, all governmental forms are only more or less perfect means to satisfy that holy and legitimate passion of men. I am given alternately democratic or aristocratic prejudices; I would perhaps have had one or the other, if I had been born in another century and in another country. But the chance of my birth has made it very easy for me to defend myself from both. I came into the world at the end of a long Revolution that, after destroying the old state, had created nothing lasting. The aristocracy was already dead when I was born, and democracy did not yet exist; so my instinct could not carry me blindly toward either the one or the other. I lived in a country that for forty years had tried a bit of everything without settling definitively on anything, so I wasn’t easily influenced regarding political illusions. As part of the old aristocracy of my country myself, I had neither hatred nor natural jealousy against the aristocracy, and since this aristocracy was destroyed, I did not have any natural love for it either, for we are strongly attached only to what is alive. I was close enough to it to know it well, far enough away to judge it without passion. I will say as much about the democratic element. No family memory, no personal interest gave me a natural and necessary inclination toward democracy. But as for me, I had received no injury from it; I had no particular reason to love it or to hate it, apart from those provided by my reason. In a word, I was in such good equilibrium between the past and the future that I felt naturally and instinctively drawn to neither the one nor the other, and it did not take great efforts for me to look calmly at both sides.” – Alexis de Tocqueville, in a letter to Henry Reeve

“I dreamt that the Virgin Mary, Hannah [Arendt], and I were running, laughing, exhilarated before the ocean, running fast, falling in the sand, laughing at ourselves as women taking on the problems of the world with the gift of our innocence. How wonderful to have found the two of you!” – Alexandra Newton Rios

“The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before he made anything, from the beginning. I was set up from eternity, and of old, before the earth was made […] I was with him, forming all things, and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times, playing in the world, and my delights were to be with the children of men.” – Wisdom 8

“Let me be the thinking hearts of these barracks.” – Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life

“Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they.” – Tennyson, “In Memoriam A.H.H.”

“…the masks or roles which the world assigns us, and which we must accept and even acquire if we are to take part in the world’s play at all, are exchangeable; they are not inalienable in the sense in which we speak of ‘inalienable rights’…” – Hannah Arendt

“The beginning of love is truth, and before He will give us His love, God must cleanse our souls of the lies that are in them. And the most effective way of detaching us from ourselves is to make us detest ourselves as we have made ourselves by sin, in order that we may love Him reflected in our souls as He has re-made them by His love.

This is the meaning of the contemplative life, and the sense of all the apparently meaningless little rules and observances and fasts and obediences and penances and humiliations and labors that go to make up the routine of existence in a contemplative monastery: they all serve to remind us of what we are and Who God is – that we may get sick of the sight of ourselves and turn to Him: and in the end, we will find Him in ourselves, in our own purified natures which have become the mirror of His tremendous Goodness and of His endless love…” – Thomas Merton

“And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”
– “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” by Rudyard Kipling

“The Church is only perfectly pure under one aspect; when considered as guardian of the sacraments. What is perfect is not the Church; it is the body and blood of Christ upon the altars.” – Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest

“I could never conceive or tolerate any Utopia which did not leave to me the
liberty for which I chiefly care, the liberty to bind myself. Complete anarchy
would not merely make it impossible to have any discipline or fidelity; it would
also make it impossible to have any fun. To take an obvious instance, it would
not be worth while to bet if a bet were not binding. The dissolution of all
contracts would not only ruin morality but spoil sport. Now betting and such
sports are only the stunted and twisted shapes of the original instinct of man
for adventure and romance, of which much has been said in these pages. And the
perils, rewards, punishments, and fulfilments of an adventure must be real, or
the adventure is only a shifting and heartless nightmare. If I bet I must be
made to pay, or there is no poetry in betting. If I challenge I must be made to
fight, or there is no poetry in challenging. If I vow to be faithful I must be
cursed when I am unfaithful, or there is no fun in vowing.” – G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Both the meditative ways, that of being and that of becoming, lead back to the same goal: the meditating person to God and therewith the understanding person to insight into the essence of the human person, who can be characterized by his openness to a transcendent being, by his being a frontier between the world, with its being and becoming, and a superworld. There person is, as we have said, the point of intersection between divine eternity and human temporality; in the person finitude is revealed as the essence of the world. The person is the experience of the limits demarcating world-immanent finiteness from the transcendent infinite.” – Eric Voegelin, Miscellaneous Papers, 1921-1938.

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
– Walt Whitman

“We are Christian, and we are German, therefore we are responsible for Germany.” – Sophie and Hans Scholl

“Thinking for yourself is good for you.” – Gershom Scholem

“I’m completely against [feminism]. I have no desire to give up my privileges.” – Hannah Arendt

“The demonstrable correlation of opposites is an image of the transcendental correlation of contradictories.” – Simone Weil

“To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind; indeed the necessary effects of the ignorance and levity of the vulgar. Such complaints and humours have existed in all times; yet as all times have not been alike, true political sagacity manifests itself in distinguishing that complaint which only characterizes the general infirmity of human nature, from those which are symptoms of the particular distemperature of our own air and season.” – Edmund Burke, “Thoughts On The Cause Of The Present Discontents”

“The length of a biography ought to be dictated by the greatness of the deeds recorded in it. Thousand-page accounts of minor politicians are the greatest offence against literature – especially when written by politicians themselves.” – Roger Scruton, On Hunting

“…we are creatures designed for contemplation as well as action…” – Edmund Burke

“A child is a gift of God. If you do not want him, give him to me.” – Mother Teresa

“Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity. ” ― Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

“The worship of will is the negation of will. To admire mere choice is to refuse to choose. If Mr. Bernard Shaw comes to me and says, ‘Will something’ that is tantamount to saying, ‘I do not mind what you will,’ and that is tantamount to saying, ‘I have no will in the matter.'” – G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Let our professors also declare publicly and on their knees that freedom is
worthless, and we shall pardon them if they mutter, provided it is under
their breath: E pur è buona. (‘And yet it is good.’)” – Frédéric Bastiat, “Declaration of War Against Professors of Political Economy”

“On doctrinal points the Catholic faith places all human capacities upon the same
level; it subjects the wise and ignorant, the man of genius and the vulgar
crowd, to the details of the same creed; it imposes the same observances upon
the rich and the needy, it inflicts the same austerities upon the strong and the
weak; it listens to no compromise with mortal man, but, reducing all the human
race to the same standard, it confounds all the distinctions of society at the
foot of the same altar, even as they are confounded in the sight of God. If
Catholicism predisposes the faithful to obedience, it certainly does not prepare
them for inequality; but the contrary may be said of Protestantism, which
generally tends to make men independent more than to render them equal.
Catholicism is like an absolute monarchy; if the sovereign be removed, all the
other classes of society are more equal than in republics.” – Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative
to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” – Edmund Burke, “Speech to the Electors at Bristol”

“The bourgeois is someone who lives in and through the good opinions of others, who thinks only of himself when he is with other people and only of other people when is by himself.” – Professor Steven B. Smith on Rousseau’s Thought

“Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.” – Fulton J. Sheen

“Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.” – Rochefoucauld

“Doesn’t the mere fact of putting something into words of itself involve an exaggeration?” – C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“Fortis et liber” – Strong and Free – Motto of Alberta

“An essay, as I understand it, tries to push an argument to its limit, with a minimum of qualification or second thoughts, and in a mood of considerable speculative confidence. An essay presents a perspective rather than new information. Much of the argument is, therefore, allusive.” – Barry Cooper, The Restoration of Political Science and the Crisis of Modernity

“Multiple choice tests are for morons.” – Barry Cooper, POLI 310, introductory class.

“Gam zeh ya’avor” – This Too Shall Pass

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.” – Character Bernard Marx in Huxley’s “Brave New World”

“The real conflict is inner conflict. Beyond the armies of occupation and the catacombs of concentration camps, there are two irreconcilable enemies in the depth of every soul: good and evil, sin and love. And what use are victories on the battlefield if we ourselves are defeated in our innermost personal selves.” – St. Maximilian Kolbe

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” – George Orwell in 1984

“There are no easy answers but there are simple answers. We must have the courage do what we know is morally right.” – Ronald Reagan

“Here I stand not only with the sense of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts that in this moment there is life and food for future years.” – William Wordsworth, “Lines Written a Few Miles From Tintern Abbey”

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” -Soren Kierkegaard

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven played music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” – Dr. Seuss

“I have found the perfect paradox that if I love until it’s hurts than there is no hurt, but rather then only more love.” Mother Teresa

“We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.” – Excerpted from Prophets of a Future Not Our Own By: Archbishop Oscar Romero

“A patient’s detriment is the practicioner’s benefit.” – Widdowson & Howard

“What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.” – Holderlin