David Withun

“Except among those whose education has been in the minimalist style, it is understood that hasty moral judgments about people in the past are a form of injustice.”
― Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present

“. . . [Nietzsche] had the good manners to despise Christianity, in large part, for what it actually was--above all, for its devotion to an ethics of compassion--rather than allow himself the soothing, self-righteous fantasy that Christianity’s history had been nothing but an interminable pageant of violence, tyranny, and sexual neurosis. He may have hated many Christians for their hypocrisy, but he hated Christianity itself principally on account of its enfeebling solicitude for the weak, the outcast, the infirm, and the diseased; and, because he was conscious of the historical contingency of all cultural values, he never deluded himself that humanity could do away with Christian faith while simply retaining Christian morality in some diluted form, such as liberal social conscience or innate human sympathy.”
― David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

“And if there were a devil it would not be one who decided against God, but one who, in eternity, came to no decision. ”
― Martin Buber, I and Thou

“If there are no books. There is no civilization.”
― Thomas Cahill