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“Not that I condone fascism, or any -ism for that matter. -Ism’s in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism, he should believe in himself. I quote John Lennon, ‘I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.’ Good point there. After all, he was the walrus. I could be the walrus. I’d still have to bum rides off people.”
Words of Ferris Bueller; John Hughes, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
“Long ago, Aristotle warned that young men are incapable of listening to lectures on political philosophy because they are doubly disadvantaged: they are overflowing with enthusiasm for changing the world, and this trait is all the more dangerous because they have so little knowledge of it. To them, everything seems possible, so they are especially prone to latching on to overly cerebral, utopian political schemes that fix every single problem in short order. That is why . . . Aristotle did not follow Socrates in his habit of speaking philosophically about politics with the young. Too many of Socrates’ young proteges ended up endorsing tyranny.”
Benjamin Wiker, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World (Washington DC: Regnery, 2008), 60.
“But a ditty at maybe the seventy-first minute latched itself onto my memory, not to unfasten anytime soon — odd given I couldn’t understand the lyrics. Suddenly, before my ears, the Holte End [of Villa Park, Aston, Birmingham] crooned a phenomenal version of the Monkees’ 1967 hit ‘Daydream Believer,’ one of the few songs I’d actually liked from the ballyhooed 1960s that preceded my adolescence. I asked my host for the lyrics that we’d just heard but that the Monkees had never imagined. Maybe two or three times, he repeated to me the phrase ’sad bluenose bastard,’ but I just couldn’t understand him, and so, with his hand shaking a bit — he was a nervous viewer who doubled over and smoked during matches — he carefully spelled it out:
Cheer up, Stevie B [Steve Bruce, manager of Birmingham City FC],
Oh, what can it mean
To a sad bluenose bastard
And a s*** football team.“
Chuck Culpepper, Bloody Confused (New York: Broadway, 2007), 52.
“Most people go through life afraid that people will not think enough of them; Paul went through life afraid that people would think too much of him (2 Cor. 12.5-6).”
D. A. Carson, Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: The Life and Reflections of Tom Carson (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), 131.
“When I was a young man, I heard D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones comment that he would not go across the street to hear himself preach. Now that I am close to the age he was when I heard him, I am beginning to understand. It is rare for me to finish a sermon without feeling somewhere between slightly discouraged and moderately depressed that I have not preached with more unction, that I have not articulated these glorious truths more powerfully and with greater insight, and so forth. But I cannot allow that to drive me to despair; rather, it must drive me to a greater grasp of the simple and profound truth that we preach and visit and serve under the gospel of grace, and God accepts us because of his Son. I must learn to accept myself not because of my putative successes but because of the merits of God’s Son. The ministry is so open-ended that one never feels that all possible work has been done, or done as well as one might like. There are always more people to visit, more studying to be done, more preparations to do. What Christians must do, what Christian leaders must do, is constantly remember that we serve our God and Maker and Redeemer under the gospel of grace. Dad’s diaries show he understood this truth in theory, and sometimes exulted in it (as when he was reading from Machen’s What is Faith?), but quite frankly, his sense of failure sometimes blinded him to the glory of gospel freedom.”
D. A. Carson, Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: The Life and Reflections of Tom Carson (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), 92-3.
“I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue [humility], but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it . . . There is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride; disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive and will every now and then peep out and show itself.”
Cited in Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 257.
“If [people] have been taught that money is the only and best good and that the market is the best test, what are they left with? I wonder about the people who felt that money was the only thing worth having, that the wealth somehow proved you were a hip, evolved, wise person, but now what? Are you not as evolved?”
An interview with Paulina Borsook, author of Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech; Helen Lee, “Silicon Values,” Christianity Today (August 6, 2001).
“The old doctrine is quite true you know – that one must attribute everything to the grace of God, and nothing to oneself. Yet as long as one is a conceited ass, there is no good pretending not to be. My self satisfaction cannot be hidden from God, whether I express it to you or not: rather the little bit of self-satisfaction which I (probably wrongly) believe myself to be fighting against, is probably merely a drop in the bottomless ocean of vanity and self-approval which the Great Eye (or Great I) sees in me.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 877; written to his friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 30 January, 1930.
“If any man has ever been successful in screwing the honey out of life it is he. One cannot help admiring the skill with which he knows exactly how far selfishness can go without rebounding on himself: he has learned to a nicety how much every plank will bear. At the same time this worldly wisdom which has an appetite for everything and yet can be content with little, which knows what can be got out of life and does not expect more, would be almost a virtue, so pleasant is it and so sensible, if it were not centered completely on self.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 501; Lewis writing to his father, dated 25 July, 1920, regarding his Uncle Augustus Hamilton (his late mother’s brother).
