You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Law' category.
“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)
“The philosopher as we understand him . . . will make use of religions for his project of cultivation and education, just as he will make use of whatever political and economic states are at hand . . . For the strong and independent who are prepared and predestined to command and in whom the reason and art of a governing race become incarnate, religion is one more means for overcoming resistances, for the ability to rule — as a bond that unites rulers and subjects and betrays and delivers the consciences of the latter, that which is most concealed and intimate and would like to elude obedience, to the former . . .”
To ordinary human beings, finally — the vast majority who exist for service and the general advantage, and who may exist only for that — religion gives an inestimable contentment with their situation and type, manifold peace of the heart, an ennobling of obedience. . . . Religion and religious significance spread the splendor of the sun over such ever-toiling human beings and make their own sight tolerable to them.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 61; cited in Benjamin Wiker, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World (Washington DC: Regnery, 2008), 160-61.
“. . . they [James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham] wanted all the moral benefits of Christianity, except without the Christianity part. They were the kind of self-assured chaps (so common in the nineteenth century) who took the fruits of centuries of Christian moral formation for granted even as they cheerfully chopped down the tree that had borne them. In consequence, they foolishly thought that because many Englishmen were generally solid and decent folk, moral solidity and decency could be counted on as standard equipment of human nature, and the whole religious thing could be thrown overboard as distracting nonsense.”
Benjamin Wiker, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World (Washington DC: Regnery, 2008), 77.
“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.
“The flesh is accursed, exercised with temptations, oppressed with heaviness and sorrow, bruised by the active righteousness of the law; but the spirit reigneth, rejoiceth and is saved by this passive and Christian righteousness, because it knoweth that it hath a Lord in heaven at the right hand of the Father, who hath abolished the law, sin, death, and hath trodden under his feet all evils, led them captive and triumphed over them in himself (Col. 2.15).”
Martin Luther, A Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, in John Dillenberger, ed., Martin Luther: Selections From His Writings (New York: Anchor, 1962), 106.
“Yes, the road from objectivity back to fandom lies pockmarked with many a garish sight. You might adopt a favorite player. You might like his biography, is will, his gymnastic capability, his recovery from malaria even if the malaria resulted from forgetting medication. Then you might see that the police detained him once, but you might invoke the old American saw ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ Then you might see that the police have detained him for a second time, whereupon it becomes possible to grow squeamish and feel conflicted, when feeling conflicted is not fun and fun would seem high among the reasons to follow this stuff, even if we’d have no idea what else to do with our time otherwise.”
Chuck Culpepper, Bloody Confused (New York: Broadway, 2007), 127.
“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.
“I know she had rather wear my pelt tann’d
In a pair of dancing pumps, . . .”
De Flores knows that his boss’s daughter, Beatrice, hates him; Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling, I.ii.228-29.
“Morality shoots short of heaven. It is only nature refined. A moral man is but old Adam dressed in fine clothes. The king’s image counterfeited and stamped upon brass will not go current.”
Thomas Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1994, first published in 1668), 67.
“Repentance is a pure gospel grace. The covenant of works admitted no repentance; there it was, sin and die. Repentance came in by the gospel.”
Thomas Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1994, first published in 1668), 13.
