Adam Pittman

“The tremendous pleasure that can come from reading Shakespeare, for instance, was spoiled for generations of high school students who were forced to go through Julius Caesar, As You Like It, or Hamlet, scene by scene, looking up all the strange words in a glossary and studying all the scholarly footnotes. As a result, they never really read a Shakespearean play.”
― Mortimer J. Adler, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

“Sincere--that was the hell of it. From a distance, one's adversaries seemed fiends, but with a closer view, one saw the sincerity and it was as great as one's own. Perhaps Satan was the sincerest of the lot.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“Someone has said that 'the saints consecrate the world,' and this is true. But they do more than this, as Raoul Plus points out: It is the saints who preserve the world. They are the true, the only conservatives in the sense that the world owes its preservation to them. They are also the true, the only liberals in the best sense of that abused word, the magnanimous, great-souled people whose minds are big enough to include heaven and whose hearts are large enough to hold all the world -- plus God.”
― Cardinal John J. Wright

“I am a college-educated American. In all my years of formal schooling, I never read Plato or Aristotle, Homer or Virgil. I knew nothing of Greek and Roman history and barely grasped the meaning of the Middle Ages. Dante was a stranger to me, and so was Shakespeare. The fifteen hundred years of Christianity from the end of the New Testament to the Reformation were a blank page, and I knew only the barest facts about Luther's revolution. I was ignorant of Descartes and Newton. My understanding of Western history began with the Enlightenment. Everything that came before it was lost behind a misty curtain of forgetting. Nobody did this on purpose. Nobody tried to deprive me of my civilizational patrimony. But nobody felt any obligation to present it to me and my generation in an orderly, coherent fashion. Ideas have consequences - and so does their lack.”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation