Charles Babbage, in a letter to Alfred Tennyson:

In your otherwise beautiful poem "The Vision of Sin" there is a verse which reads – "Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born." It must be manifest that if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death.

I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read – "Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 1/16 is born."

The actual figure is so long I cannot get it onto a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.

I am, Sir, yours, etc.,

Charles Babbage

Sounds a lot like the method of interpretation used by many in regards to the Bible to convict it of "error", only with the difference that Babbage was presumably kidding. :-)

"A third criterion that Newman puts forward is what he calls 'the power of assimilation.' Just as a healthy organism can take in what it can from its environment, even as it resists what it must, so a sane and lively idea can take to itself what is best in the intellectual atmosphere, even as it throws off what is noxious. Both total accommodation to the culture and total resistance to it are usually signs of intellectual sickness."
-from an article by Fr. Robert Barron (italics mine).

"Sociologist Philip Rieff, in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, observed that institutions die when they can no longer communicate their core values to the next generation in a convincing way. He said this to support his contention (in 1966!) that Christianity was dying in the West, because we Westerners have become hostile to the ascetic spirit that is inextricable from authentic Christianity, and has been from the beginning. As you know, I believe Rieff was right, and that his being right is not something that traditional Christians should take comfort in, except in this one way: a Christianity that does demand something sacrificial from its followers is not only being true to the nature of the religion, but is far more likely to engender the kind of devotion that will endure through the therapeutic dark age. Aside from its radical theological innovations that are impossible to harmonize with Christianity as it was known for its first 1,900 years, Progressive Christianity has fully embraced the therapeutic mindset, in the sense that Rieff means. It is dying because it cannot convince young people to embrace its values within the institutional churches. It can’t be denied that many of the young do accept the social liberalism embraced by the progressive churches, but it also can’t be denied that most of them don’t see why they have to be part of a church to be socially progressive.'

"Theological conservatives had better watch out with this. If you raise up young people to believe that the truth of their theological beliefs is determined by the quality of their emotional experience in worship, you are undermining your foundations."

-Rod Dreher

"A judicious silence is always better than truth spoken without charity"

-St. Francis de Sales [H/T Michelle Arnold]

"Self-control is the control and rightful-ordering of desires and passions by the rational self. Liberation, as promoted by liberals, socialists, and other libertarians, is the setting-free of desires and passions from the command of the rational self, the thraldom of the latter to the former, and the manipulation and control of the desires and passions by outer forces over the vanquished self. This is the “free man” which the libertarians promote: the man without self-control, not a master of his passions, but their thrall in “free expression” — and a thrall also to those who know how to manipulate and control the passions of others."

-Deogolwulf, at Wiþ Endemanndom

[H/T Mike Flynn]

"What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning."

–Werner Karl Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science

[H/T Mike Flynn]

“The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”

Robert Conquest

{H/T Mike Flynn)

We are not baptized into the hierarchy; do not receive the cardinals sacramentally; will not spend an eternity in the beatific vision of the pope. St. John Fisher could say in a public sermon, "If the pope will not reform the curia, God will." A couple of years later, he laid his head on Henry VIII's block for papal supremacy; followed to the same block by Thomas More, who had sepnt his youth under the Borgia pope, Alexander VI; lived his early manhood under the Medici pope Leo X; and died for papal supremacy under Clement VIII, as time-serving a pope as Rome ever had.

Christ is the point. I myself admire the present pope, but even if I criticized him as harshly as some do, even if his successor proved to be as bad as some of those who have gone before, even if I sometimes find the Church as I have to live with it, a pain in the neck, I should still say that nothing a Pope [or a priest] could do or say would make me wish to leave the Church, although I might well wish that they would leave. Israel, through its best periods as through its worst, preserved the truth of God's oneness in a world swarming with gods and a sense of God's majesty in a world sick with its own pride. So with the Church. Under the worst administration we could still learn Christ's truth, receive his life in the sacraments, be in union with him to the limit of our willingness. In awareness of Christ I can know the Church as his mystical body, and we must not make our judgment by the neck's sensitivity to pain.

-Frank Sheed (1897-1981)

"It is far better to do a few things well than to undertake many good works and leave them half-done."

 -St. Francis de Sales

"I hope that, should pop Atheism ever becomes more mainstream, appeals to Brute Facts will be allowed in courts of law."

-commenter on Edward Feser's blog

From a comment on Edward Feser's blog by "Mr. Green":

MR. GREEN: No sane person would take David Hume seriously!!!
MAN IN THE STREET: What? Take whom seriously?
MR. GREEN: No, don't!
MAN: Don't what?
MR. GREEN: Don't take Hume seriously.
MAN: That's what I want to know — whom?
MR. GREEN: Yes, Hume!
MAN: So will you tell me — whom do you mean??
MR. GREEN: Of course.
MAN: OK. Then tell me.
MR. GREEN: Tell you what?
MAN: No, tell me whom!
MR. GREEN: Um... [holding my head] I can't!
MAN: I. Kant? Oh, man, what a crackpot. No sane philosopher should take him seriously!

"Proud is many a man who looks down on his neighbor because the wool of his gown is finer! Yet as fine as it is, a poor sheep wore it upon her back before it came upon his back, and all the while she wore it, she was after all still only a sheep. And why should he now think himself better than she was simply by having that wool-----wool that, even though it is now his, is still not so truly his as it was truly hers?"

-St. Thomas More (H/T Jason Sims)