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“. . . 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.
“For the past twenty-five years, culture has been obsessed with making males and females more alike, and that’s fine. Maybe it’s even enlightened. But what I’ve noticed — at least among young people — is that this convergence has mostly just prompted females to adopt the worst qualities of men. It’s like girls are trying to attain equality by becoming equally shallow and selfish.”
Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto (New York: Scribner, 2004), 178.
“Computers make children advance faster, but they also make them think like computers.”
Describing the effect of computer games; Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto (New York: Scribner, 2004), 17.
“Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.”
Walter Gropius, from the Bauhaus Manifesto, cited in William Edgar, “No News Is Good News: Modernity, The Postmodern, and Apologetics,” Westminster Theological Journal 57 (Fall 1995).
“Gonna change my way of thinking
Make myself a different set of rules
Gonna change my way of thinking
Make myself a different set of rules
Gonna put my good foot forward
And stop being influenced by fools.”
Bob Dylan, “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking”
“There is indeed much about this property to whet his appetite if only the price suites him: easy access to Rome, good communications, a modest house, and sufficient land for him to enjoy without taking up too much of his time. Scholars who take to the country, like himself, need no more land than will suffice to clear their heads and refresh their eyes, as they stroll around their grounds and tread their single path, getting to know each of their precious vines and counting every fruit tree.”
Pliny the Younger writes to his friend, Baebius Hispanus, who is selling a piece of property in Italy. Pliny would like to recommend to him the historian, Seuetonius Tranquillus, as a potential buyer; Pliny the younger, Letters, 24, 1-4 (trans. B. Radice).
Reflecting upon how an emotional robot might express love, Hans Moravec, a AI specialist at Carnegie-Mellon University, asserts that,“When you bring one into your house, it will understand that you’re the person it’s there for, and that it had better keep you happy …”
The fact that ‘love’ equals ‘my own happiness as I define it’ is insipid hubris; Michio Kaku, Visions (New York: Anchor, 1997), 91.
“There is nothing more absurd … than the millions who wish to live in luxury and idleness and yet be slender and good-looking.”
Wendell Berry, “The Unsettling of America,” in The Art of the Commonplace, edited by Norman Wirzba (Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2002), 43.
“… we have made golden calves of ourselves – become a nation of terrified, self-obsessed idols.
”Bill McKibben, “The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong,” 31-37, Harper’s Magazine (August, 2005), 37.
