VBV > VBV's Quotes

“The Church is a perpetually defeated thing that always outlives her conquerers.”
― Hilaire Belloc

“On ne comprends rien à la civilisation moderne, si l'on n'admet pas d'abord qu'elle est une conspiration universelle contre toute espèce de vie intérieure.”
― George Bernanos

“For the more we think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the harder it is to learn gratitude and humility. And without these sentiments, it is hard to care for the common good.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“Ungenerous to the losers and oppressive to the winners, merit becomes a tyrant.”
― Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?

“Any idiot can face a crisis; it's this day-to-day living that wears you out.”
― Anton Chekhov

“Ideology is strong exactly because it is no longer experienced as ideology… we feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”
― Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes

“art is not just a heightened procedure of providing sensual pleasures, but a medium of Truth;”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View

“To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.”
― Etienne Gilson

“He(E.A.Poe) cannot be blamed for not saying clearly what beauty is. The greatest philosophers in the world acknowledge in the end that the best one can do is to recognize it when it is there.”
― Étienne Gilson

“We do not know the play. We do not even know whether we are in Act I or Act V. We do not know who are the major and who the minor characters. The Author knows.”
― C.S. Lewis, The World's Last Night: And Other Essays

“Social responsibility above the level of family, or at most of tribe, requires imagination-- devotion, loyalty, all the higher virtues -- which a man must develop himself; if he has them forced down him, he will vomit them out.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

“Both for practical reasons and for mathematically verifiable moral reasons, authority and responsibility must be equal - else a balancing takes place as surely as current flows between points of unequal potential. To permit irresponsible authority is to sow disaster; to hold a man responsible for anything he does not control is to behave with blind idiocy. The unlimited democracies were unstable because their citizens were not responsible for the fashion in which they exerted their sovereign authority... other than through the tragic logic of history... No attempt was made to determine whether a voter was socially responsible to the extent of his literally unlimited authority. If he voted the impossible, the disastrous possible happened instead - and responsibility was then forced on him willy-nilly and destroyed both him and his foundationless temple.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

“This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted . . . and get it, without toil, without sweat, without tears.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

“Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Pilate was merciful till it became risky.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“...logical validity is not a guarantee of truth.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Только тот стал человеком, кто написал себя заново, поверх вычеркнутого.”
― Dmitry Bykov, Икс

“If Tolkien has a message, it is simple. Modern life tends to blind us to the true value of things - call it enchantment, if you will. Fantasy is a way to 'clean our windows' so we can see things as they are, he said, 'freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity - from possessiveness'.”
― John Garth, The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien: The Places That Inspired Middle-earth

“Progress is not motivated by money. Progress comes from those who are happy to embark on a course of action without quite knowing where it will lead, without doing a feasibility study, without fear of failure or too much hope of reward.”
― Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers

“Man creates. the machine duplicates. In each case a different principle is appealed to, a different characteristic, called into being. To create is to cause to exist a thing that is unique. To duplicate is to cause to exist a thing that is uniform.”
― Brian Keeble, Art For Whom and For What?

“The tool produces according to human needs, the machine regardless of human needs.”
― Brian Keeble, Art For Whom and For What?

“So we perhaps begin to see that work is not something we must be freed from - indeed cannot be freed from unless we are freeed entirely from action - but something we must engage in in such way and at such level that it is revealing of our deepest nature. It must contribute to our spiritual life while serving our bodily needs.
The very opposite of this case with the industrial pattern of work which is part and parcel of a social ethos that continually holds out the promise of leisure as a reward for the time and effort put into work. But this escape to a state of freedom from work is not offered as something that will serve our spiritual needs. Far from it.”
― Brian Keeble, Art For Whom and For What?

“What has been made all but impossible by the industrial system is that men and women can attain a livelihood by doing what is both aesthetically and morally sound and economically and practically valid, by a means that allows them both intellectual and spiritual responsibility.”
― Brian Keeble, Art For Whom and For What?

“I am not what I ought to be, I am not what I want to be, I am not what I hope to be in another world; but still I am not what I once used to be, and by the grace of God I am what I am”
― John Newton