Hannah Sillars

“If only the sun-drenched celebrities are being noticed and worshiped, then our children are going to have a tough time seeing the value in the shadows, where the thinkers, probers and scientists are keeping society together.”
― Rita Dove

“But although it is the case that anyone who contends that in the Catholic medieval civilization of Europe woman was on the whole reckoned as the second—not the first—sex, can support his view by examples which appear conclusive, yet it is equally certain that women who in one way or another possessed more than average ability were given a chance of developing their talents and exercising them with a freedom from interference which would be inconceivable in a society molded by Lutheranism or Calvinism. Both the one-sided Lutheran eulogy of a snug family life and the Calvinistic hatred of spiritual charm, of the imaginative and poetical element in religion, and especially the Calvinists’ glorification of the industrious accumulation of capital and their belief in economic success as a peculiar favor bestowed on God’s elect—all this resulted in a contempt for specially feminine intellectual qualities: intuition, a psychological sense manifesting itself in tact and a gentle dignity in the courtesies of life, discretion, and feeling in the work of Christian charity.”
― Sigrid Undset, Stages on the Road

“And we, too, being called by His will to Christ Jesus, are not justified by ourselves, nor by our own wisdom, or understanding or godliness, or works which we have wrought in holiness of heart; but by that faith through which, from the beginning, Almighty God has justified all men; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.”
― Clement of Rome, The First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians

“The truth is that we, in our hyperprosperity, may be able to live without meaning, faith or purpose, filling our threescore years and ten with a variety of entertainments—but most of the world cannot. If economics is implicated in the conflict, it is mostly in an ironic sense: only an abundance of riches such as no previous generation has known could possibly console us for the emptiness of our lives, the absence of stable families and relationships, and the lack of any overarching purpose.”
― Meic Pearse, Why the Rest Hates the West: Understanding the Roots of Global Rage