Adam Carman

“Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”
― James Madison, The Federalist Papers

“Pity.” The elder gentleman sniffed. “Sad, really. Names are very important.” “It’s a matter of taste, surely.” “Nothing of the sort,” replied the elder Cosimo. “People get named all sorts of things—that I will concede. Whimsy, ignorance, sudden inspiration—all play a part. But if anyone guessed how monumentally important it was, the process would be taken a lot more seriously.”
― Stephen R. Lawhead, The Bright Empires Collection

“Sir Arthur St. Clare, as I have already said, was a man who read his Bible. That was what was the matter with him. When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else's Bible? A printer reads a Bible for misprints. A Mormon reads his Bible, and finds polygamy; a Christian Scientist reads his, and finds we have no arms and legs. St. Clare was an old Anglo-Indian Protestant soldier. Now, just think what that might mean; and, for Heaven's sake, don't cant about it. It might mean a man physically formidable living under a tropic sun in an Oriental society, and soaking himself without sense or guidance in an Oriental Book. Of course, he read the Old Testament rather than the New. Of course, he found in the Old Testament anything that he wanted—lust, tyranny, treason. Oh, I dare say he was honest, as you call it. But what is the good of a man being honest in his worship of dishonesty?”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown

“If she had ever once in her life given the realities of life in seventeenth-century Bohemia a fleeting thought—and she most certainly had not—she would have pictured a world of superstition and suffering where obscenely rich and powerful aristocrats oppressed the miserable mass of grimy peasants whose lives were nasty, brutish, and short. Yet the folk she observed bustling around her, while admittedly grimy and short, seemed a fairly happy lot—judging solely from the air of amiable bonhomie permeating the Old Town square. Everywhere she looked, people were smiling, laughing, greeting one another with formal handshakes and kisses.”
― Stephen R. Lawhead, The Bright Empires Collection