"Blessed are the pliable hearts, for they will never break."

...they will try to render their hearts supple and pliable, submissive and ready to condescend in all things allowable, and to show obedience and charity in every undertaking, so as to resemble the dove, which receives all the lights the sun gives her. Blessed are the pliable hearts, for they will never break.

-St. Francis de Sales, The True Spiritual Conferences of St. Francis of Sales

"Patriotism is the last refuge of a right wing scoundrel. 'Hate' [i.e., accusing others of] is the first refuge of a left wing scoundrel. The Left, even more than the right, loves manichaean division of the human race into the Children of light and the children of darkness."

-Mark Shea (combox comment)

"One of the best ways to see how to violate all the rules of logic is to examine the arguments – if you can call them arguments at all – of those who try to defend abortion. First of all, the last thing they want to talk about is the very thing they try to defend, namely, abortion. They will talk about choice, freedom, the Constitution, the Church, women’s rights and sometimes, women’s health, but they won’t define or describe abortion itself. The reason is simple: abortion cannot be defended. As soon as it is described, or viewed, the human conscience objects to its obvious violence." -quote shared on a friend's Facbeook

"Socrates gave no diplomas or degrees, and would have subjected any disciple who demanded one to a disconcerting catechism on the nature of true knowledge." -G. M. Trevelyan

From the (ironic) Preface to Hilaire Belloc's book The Battleground :-)

This book needs a brief apology. The writer has not only taken for granted that there is a God, but also design in the Universe and in the story of Mankind. He has affirmed a special design in the story of Syria and especially Israel, reaching a climax at the Crucifixion. He even seems to imply the Divinity of his Saviour.

All this must sound so unusual today that it may be thought an affectation, deliberately assumed to startle and offend. Such a feeling will be enhanced by the discovery that he takes the Gospel of St. John to have been written by St. John and even allows some historical value in the Old Testament.

The sole excuse he offers for his extravagance is that the present Generation is tolerant of novel ideas, and that he therefore may hope for indulgence.

"All language is shorthand..."

All language is shorthand; any sentence to express reality must be modified indefinitely...

-Hilaire Belloc, Essays of a Catholic (1931)

Tradition

The great thing about being Catholic is that you can plagiarize and call it “being faithful to the Tradition”.

-Mark Shea

Sin and forgiveness

A culture that perpetually excuses sin is a culture that cannot, when push comes to shove, forgive it. Paradoxically, a culture that bites the bullet of acknowledging the reality of sin is a culture that carries within it the possibility of accepting forgiveness for sin.

-Mark Shea

Despotism and democracy

It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. ....

It covers the surface of society with a net-work of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting

[I]t is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life... Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will.

-- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Found via Mike Flynn's blog

A perfect description of today's society...

The devil Screwtape:

We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying to make endemic. The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under.

-The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis

"But while they desire to set aside that true Council, they endeavor to give that name to their own unlawful combination; while they are unwilling that the decrees of the Council should be enforced, they desire to enforce their own decisions; and they use the name of a Council, while they refuse to submit themselves to one so great as this. Thus they care not for Councils, but only pretend to do so in order that they may root out the orthodox".

No, that's not an orthodox Catholic from EWTN commenting on a "spirit of Vatican 2" type (the latter needing to be dealt with by Geistbusters. Heh. :-) . Rather, that is a quote from St. Athanasius's Apologia Contra Arianos dealing, of course, with how the Arians tried to hijack the First Council of Nicea. But since today many try to hijack Vatican 2, I guess that only goes to prove Ecclesiastes 1:10-11 correct.

"What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there a thing of which it is said, 'See, this is new'? It has been already in the ages before us."

"What a strange world we moderns have created, where everything is permissible, and nothing is forgivable"

What a strange world we moderns have created, where everything is permissible, and nothing is forgivable

-commenter on Mark Shea's blog a couple of years ago