Northern > Northern's Quotes

“Broadmindedness, when it means indifference to right and wrong, eventually ends in a hatred of what is right.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Life of Christ

“If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.”
― Fulton J. Sheen

“Why are those who are notoriously undisciplined and unmoral also most contemptuous of religion and morality? They are trying to solace their own unhappy lives by pulling the happy down to their own abysmal depths.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Seven Words of Jesus and Mary: Lessons from Cana and Calvary

“People today will have you believing life is a blank slate upon which you can write anything at all--this is poetic, even romantic. Unfortunately, it's also a lie, because life exists in, is bound by, shaped by, controlled by, and functions within a construct. Attempt to function outside that construct, or bend it to our will, or remove it completely, and you throw all of society into chaos. We're seeing that now.

Like it or not, birds don't fly upside down...and neither can we.”
― Northern Adams, Mickey and the Gargoyle

“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Tolerance is not a Christian value. Charity, justice, mercy, prudence, honesty--these are Christian values.”
― Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

“She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Someone once told the Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor that it is more open-minded to think that the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is a great, wonderful, powerful symbol.

Her response was, “If it’s only a symbol, to hell with it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient to become independent of it.”
― John D. Rockefeller

“A thick head can do as much damage as a hard heart.”
― H.W. Dodds

“When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra

“Laws don't limit freedom. Laws insure the freedoms of the majority. Laws are unjust when they serve to put the majority of the people at the mercy of an aggressive, hostile minority.”
― Northern Adams

“Just because a thing is present on earth, that does not mean it is inherently good or that we're supposed to consume or exploit it. The Bible itself can be used for both good and evil. That doesn't mean it's flawed. That means that it is perfect.

Again, as always, it comes down to us, and the choices we make.”
― Northern Adams, Mickey and the Gargoyle

“It is human nature to constantly reach out for something to tether oneself to, but it's the fool who cannot tell what he's trying to grasp. Is it a lifeline, or a length of rope just long enough to hang oneself with? And still he reaches out, in desperation and ignorance, taking hold of it with both hands, without ever wondering what the other end is attached to.”
― Northern Adams, Mickey and the Gargoyle

“Any time someone gives you drugs, the purpose is to subdue. Always. Whether it is from a dealer, a friend, your mother/brother/sister/son, or your government--especially your government--the intention is to subdue, and always to feed another motive. Why?

Because in getting high, your power and your intellect are blunted. Can the motive ever be in your best interests? Governments notoriously use sex, drink, and drugs to subdue their people. Notoriously. And we're falling for it.”
― Northern Adams, Mickey and the Gargoyle

“The Bible itself can be used for both good and evil. That doesn't mean it's flawed. It means that it is perfect.”
― Northern Adams, Mickey and the Gargoyle

“The media only writes about the sinners and the scandals, he said, but that's normal, because 'a tree that falls makes more noise than a forest that grows.”
― Pope Francis

“Idolatry, then, is always polytheism, an aimless passing from one lord to another. Idolatry does not offer a journey but rather a plethora of paths leading nowhere and forming a vast labyrinth.”
― Pope Francis, Lumen Fidei: Enciclica sulla Fede

“Orthodoxy is marked by sobriety, not by emotional enthusiasm. It is also marked by a quite “ordinary” persistence in living the humble, consistent life of Christ, not by seeking out extraordinary experiences, especially supernatural ones.”
― Andrew Stephen Damick, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: Exploring Belief Systems through the Lens of the Ancient Christian Faith

“the spirit of wickedness in high places is now so powerful and many-headed in its incarnations that there seems nothing more to do than personally refuse to worship any of the hydras' heads.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays

“By undue profundity, we perplex and enfeeble thought; and it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too direct.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
― Edgar Allen Poe

“Too many people get credit for being good, when they are only being passive. They are too often praised for being broadminded when they are so broadminded they can never make up their minds about anything.”
― Fulton J. Sheen

“When you think of the condition the world is in now you sometimes wish that Noah had missed the boat.”
― Fulton J. Sheen

“Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil … a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. Tolerance applies only to persons … never to truth. Tolerance applies to the erring, intolerance to the error … Architects are as intolerant about sand as foundations for skyscrapers as doctors are intolerant about germs in the laboratory. Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant, and for this kind of intolerance, so much needed to rouse us from sentimental gush, I make a plea. Intolerance of this kind is the foundation of all stability.”
― Fulton J. Sheen

“She wondered that hope was so much harder then despair.”
― Patricia Briggs, Cry Wolf

“We can talk about human dignity, but where is it?”
― Michael Novak, Writing from Left to Right: My Journey from Liberal to Conservative

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
― David Foster Wallace

“There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, Mistral's Kiss

“If depression was a choice, no one would choose it. Depression is not a choice.”
― Northern Adams, Mickey and the Gargoyle