Ryan N.S. Topping > Quotes

“of expression is a society that soon finds itself crowded with the army of counselors, social service agents, and police officers needed to manage and contain the young people it has set adrift without rudder.”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Case for Catholic Education: Why Parents, Teachers, and Politicians Should Reclaim the Principles of Catholic Pedagogy

“We are growing accustomed, perhaps like frogs in warming water, to seeing education as an instrument for political ends, and the teacher as a servant of the state.”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Case for Catholic Education: Why Parents, Teachers, and Politicians Should Reclaim the Principles of Catholic Pedagogy

“Moderns maintain a peculiar relationship with rhetoric. We no longer teach it to our young, nor demand it of our wise. What since ancient Athens was considered an essential skill for a free citizen has now largely been consigned to hucksters and to the tarmacs of used car dealerships. The tragedy is that we abandoned the art on purpose. About the same time the Russians flung Sputnik into space, in the name of progress American, Canadian, and British educators tossed the old grammar and style books onto the intergalactic rubbish heap of history. The past was trashed. In a scientific age, so the reasoning went, questions of philosophy, of beauty, of sex, of God, could be set aside in favor of technological solutions. The science was settled. Just the same, the timing couldn’t have been worse. Who would’ve foreseen that at the same hour the West turned its back on its humanistic traditions, it would be called to police the global order, shore up markets, and shoot down terrorists?”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Elements of Rhetoric -- How to Write and Speak Clearly and Persuasively: A Guide for Students, Teachers, Politicians & Preachers

“It may be true that the law can’t change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also. (Martin Luther King, Jr., Address to Ohio Northern University, 1968)”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Elements of Rhetoric -- How to Write and Speak Clearly and Persuasively: A Guide for Students, Teachers, Politicians & Preachers

“Men and women make decisions. Decisions repeated form a habit; the sum of your habits adds up to the value of your character. Sooner or later someone you respect is going to ask: What is yours worth?”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Elements of Rhetoric -- How to Write and Speak Clearly and Persuasively: A Guide for Students, Teachers, Politicians & Preachers

“Whereas grammar governs conventions for clear speech among men, logic is the language of God. Up until the Second World War nearly anyone who passed through a European or American university would have taken a basic course in logic structured around what is known as “the three acts of the mind.” One reason why a grasp of the three acts is useful is that it can help you spot the mistake that lies behind the most common logical fallacies.”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Elements of Rhetoric -- How to Write and Speak Clearly and Persuasively: A Guide for Students, Teachers, Politicians & Preachers

“You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. (C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1952)”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Elements of Rhetoric -- How to Write and Speak Clearly and Persuasively: A Guide for Students, Teachers, Politicians & Preachers

“Whereas grammar governs conventions for clear speech among men, logic is the language of God.”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Elements of Rhetoric -- How to Write and Speak Clearly and Persuasively: A Guide for Students, Teachers, Politicians & Preachers

“And yet, to teach the Gospel in our day requires not only that we share our faith, but also that we identify the errors that seek to undermine Christian culture. Here I will mention two that belong to the practice of progressive teaching: that it takes a village to raise a child, and that children are naturally whole.”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Case for Catholic Education: Why Parents, Teachers, and Politicians Should Reclaim the Principles of Catholic Pedagogy

“Catholics believe that the Pope will never lead the Church into error, at least in his doctrinal formulations of matters of faith and morals. History well attests that popes can be corrupt, inept, and imprudent; but they have never — so Catholics claim — proposed as a matter of belief anything contrary to faith (CCC 890). Besides this, Catholics think there are purely logical reasons for why such a thing as a Magisterium is necessary. For the”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, Rebuilding Catholic Culture

“About the time the Beatles started to write songs, a group of linguists concocted a theory that modern people are too dumb to read books older than Curious George; so the experts decided to re-write them. In the 1970s, committees began to re-translate, notably, both the Bible and liturgical books.”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Elements of Rhetoric -- How to Write and Speak Clearly and Persuasively: A Guide for Students, Teachers, Politicians & Preachers

“First and foremost every Catholic educational institution is a place to encounter the living God who in Jesus Christ reveals his transforming love and truth.”67”
― Ryan N.S. Topping, The Case for Catholic Education: Why Parents, Teachers, and Politicians Should Reclaim the Principles of Catholic Pedagogy