"Humanity is a parade of fools, and I am at the front of it, twirling a baton."

-Dean Koontz, Brother Odd (the quote is made by the protagonist of the story).

"The question is not whether the Church will survive persecution in the West. It’s whether the West will survive persecuting the Church."

The question is not whether the Church will survive persecution in the West. It’s whether the West will survive persecuting the Church. Meanwhile, in the global south and Asia, the Church continues to explode in numbers. The problem the Church faces is not decline, but insufficient numbers of vocations to handle the vast ocean of converts pouring in–including, by the way, unprecedented numbers of converts in the Islamic world.

-Mark Shea

My buddy Scott Hahn, the Bible scholar, likes to point out that the Psalter has more songs of complaint than any other kind of song. Complaining, he says, is different from grumbling. The Israelites grumbled in the desert, to each other. David complained- to God. We complain to someone we trust. Old King David wasn't just kvetching; he was complaining to a Father. He was singing the blues.

-Dion DiMucci, Dion: The Wanderer Talks Truth (2011)

How many times does a man need to say something before he is safe from the accusation of having said exactly the opposite?

-C.S. Lewis
"A Rejoinder to Dr. Pittenger" (1958)
The Essential C.S. Lewis (edited by Lyle W. Dorsett, 1996)

[As a Catholic, I can heartily sympathize with the above quote...]

The Roman Republic fell, not because of the ambition of Caesar or Augustus, but because it had already long ceased to be in any real sense a republic at all. When the sturdy Roman plebeian, who lived by his own labor, who voted without reward according to his own convictions, and who with his fellows formed in war the terrible Roman legion, had been changed into an idle creature who craved nothing in life save the gratification of a thirst for vapid excitement, who was fed by the state, and directly or indirectly sold his vote to the highest bidder, then the end of the republic was at hand, and nothing could save it. The laws were the same as they had been, but the people behind the laws had changed, and so the laws counted for nothing.

-Theodore Roosevelt
Social Justice and Popular Rule: Essays, Addresses, and Public Statements (1923)