MoreRoper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Quote of the Day: The Benefit of the Law
Tag: QOTD
Quote of the Day: G.K. Chesterton on Generations
“I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.”
– G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, June 3, 1922
A constant in electoral politics is pitting the generations against each other. Many Boomers thought the Greatest Generation was too staid and traditional. Gen Xers found Boomers self-indulgent and profligate. Since Generation X is famously a forgotten generation, Millennials content themselves with bashing the Boomers as well.
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Quote of the Day: Tolerance and Religion
“The frustrating thing is that those who are attacking religion claim they are doing it in the name of tolerance, freedom, and openmindedness. Question: Isn’t the real truth that they are intolerant of religion? They refuse to tolerate its importance in our lives.”
– Ronald Reagan
We saw that illustrated by Robert “Beto” O’Rourke this last Thursday when he threatened to strip churches of tax-exempt status if they did not perform same-sex “marriages,” and the Democrats cheered. This bigoted, intolerant position was (of course) framed as a means of fighting bigotry and intolerance.
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Member Post
So the other day I quoted Samuel Johnson. From that, I suppose it naturally follows that I should mine through the inextinguishable wisdom available from some of Ricochet’s favorite artists. Of course, I’m speaking of hip hop’s Public Enemy. Beware of the handWhen it’s coming from the LeftI aint trippin,’ just watch ya step.Can’t truss […]
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Quote of the Day: Happy Henry Mühlenberg Day!
“JULY 4 [1776]. Today the Continental Congress openly declared the united provinces of North America to be free and independent states. This has caused some thoughtful and far-seeing melancholici to be down in the mouth; on the other hand, it has caused some sanguine and short-sighted persons to exult and shout with joy. It will appear in the end who has played the right tune. This remains as a comfort to believers: There is One who sits at the rudder, who has the plan of the whole before him, to whom all power in heaven and one earth is given, and who has never yet made a mistake in his government. He it is who neither sleeps nor slumbers and who has asked his people to pray, ‘Hallowed by thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done.'”
—Diary of a Colonial Clergyman, by Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg
Though you may not know the name, Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg is kind of a big deal among Lutherans. Born in Einbeck in Hanover in 1711, Mühlenberg was destined to become the patriarch of Lutheranism in North America. After studying at the University of Göttingen, he was ordained into the ministry in 1739, and accepted a call overseas to the German-speaking Lutherans in Pennsylvania in 1742.
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Member Post
No cause more frequently produces bashfulness than too high an opinion of our own importance. He that imagines an assembly filled with his merit, panting with expectation, and hushed with attention, easily terrifies himself with the dread of disappointing them, and strains his imagination in pursuit of something that may vindicate the veracity of fame, […]
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Member Post
The Earth is the cradle of humanity, but mankind cannot stay in the cradle forever. – Konstantin Tsiolkovsky Konstantin Tsiolkovsky was a largely self-taught scientist born in 1857 who pioneered most of the basic concepts in astronautics. He developed the rocket equation, among other things. He was focused on space flight before we had achieved powered […]
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Quote of the Day: Faith
“Economics is not the central problem of this century. It is a relative problem which can be solved in relative ways. Faith is the central problem of this age. The Western world does not know it, but it already possesses the answer to this problem – but only provided its faith in God and the freedom He enjoins is as great as Communism’s faith in Man.” — Whittaker Chambers, Witness
These words remain applicable today, and yet so many of our current political debates focus on economics. As a parent of children attending public schools, I see faith in God being deliberately replaced with faith in man. Schools eagerly preach the religion of environmentalism under the guise of science, or English, or whatever other subject they can tangentially relate to its themes.
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Quote of the Day: Heretics and Converts
“As the old saying has it, the left looks for heretics and the right looks for converts, and both find what they’re looking for. The effect is no doubt subliminal, but people who treat you like crap are, over time, less persuasive than people who don’t. If people on the Left are so unhappy about how many former allies are changing their views, perhaps they should examine how those allies are treated.” – Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit)
Reynolds wrote this over a decade ago, during the early years of Instapundit. Yet I believe it remains true today, and is one reason I believe the Democrats will lose the 2020 election bigly. They are alienating too many people, and alienating them at an increasing rate. They are attacking their own allies, too, over minor differences in dogma.
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QotD 27 Sep: Absurdity
Quote of the Day: Winning and Losing
“Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.” – Vince Lombardi
With a new election coming up we can see plenty of illustrations of this principle – with both parties.
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Quote of the Day: Liberty
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. “– Eric Blair (writing as George Orwell)
Which is another proof woke culture is anti-liberty and at its heart fascistic. Not only do they not want to hear what they do not want to hear – they want no one else to hear what woke culture does not want to hear. They want you to have the freedom to agree with them and no other freedom of speech, press, or thought. Ironically, Blair’s words are written on the side of BBC HQ in London. Whether it did in the past, the BBC doesn’t really mean it today.
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Quote of the Day: Do Something
“Those who cry out that the government should ‘do something’ never even ask for data on what has actually happened when the government did something, compared to what actually happened when the government did nothing.” – Thomas Sowell
Another helping of Sowell food. We have been hearing a lot about “doing something” in the aftermath of a tragedy, catastrophe, or a disaster. Of course the responsibility for doing something is always assigned to the government, rather than taking individual responsibility. Yet the truth is, nine times out of ten, nothing need have been done outside of enforcing existing laws or exercising prudence.
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Quote of the Day – True Wealth
All . . . true wealth . . . is biological. – Lois McMaster Bujold, Mirror Dance
Those words are spoken by the character Count Aral Vorkosigan to his son, Mark Pierre Vorkosigan in the science fiction novel Mirror Dance. The count has suffered a major heart attack and may be dying. His son is a clone, created from his other son, Miles as a weapon against the Vokosigan family, but who rebelled against his creators (and actually everyone). When this episode takes place Mark has been involuntarily returned to his family, believes he may have done something that killed his older brother Miles (who vanished trying to rescue Mark during a battle. (The novel is worth reading – as are all of Bujold’s Vorkosiverse stories.)
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Quote of the Day: “How About a Co-Cola?”
My mother was born and raised in the small town of Ridge Spring, SC on a large farm with a huge columned house. My older brother was born there shortly after our father went off in WWII. When I was growing up, my family would often go down for several weeks during the summers and sometimes, my father would drive back home to work for several weeks and then come back to get us at the end of the summer. For most of the summer, all we did was play outside.
Even though there was a lot of shade from the trees, there was no air conditioning and us kids would get pretty hot in the mid-afternoon after playing outside all day.
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Quote of the Day: Risks and Results
“You don’t concentrate on risks. You concentrate on results. No risk is too great to prevent the necessary job from getting done.” – Chuck Yeager
Today we focus almost exclusively on the risk of any new endeavor, not the results. Yet Chuck Yeager is right – if the potential results justify it, the risks are worth taking. But nothing ever gets done if you consider the risks as more important than the results and concentrate on the risks instead of the results.
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Quote of the Day – How Freedom is Lost
I left the Soviet Union to escape communism, socialism, Marxism — whatever you want to call it. America was and still is the only place in the world you are truly free, and you are losing it. Now the evil is coming here; it is all around us, especially where I live in California. These people are ignorant, they have no historical knowledge, and they are very dangerous. The ideology is seductive to America’s naive youth and always ends up with people dead. – Svetlana, the pseudonym of a Soviet émigré to the United States, now in her 80s.
The quote comes from a woman interviewed for a Washington Times article on the seduction of socialism. They kept her name secret for fear of the consequences to her if they revealed it. The need for secrecy is real and all very soviet. A SJW mob would show no reluctance to dogpile an eighty-something woman who warns of the consequences of the mob’s actions.
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Member Post
“You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.” Marcus Aurelius More
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Quote of the Day: Vegetarian Philosophy
“But here’s my question. Why do the companies that sell ‘not meat’ — Frankenfoods made from plant cells and/or vegetable cocktails — spend millions of dollars to make it look exactly like meat? Wouldn’t that be a contradiction in vegetarian philosophy? ‘I’ve decided to chew leaves the rest of my life, but I want all the leaves to look like hot dogs.'” – Joe Bob Briggs
I am a vegan this week – and next. Voluntarily, although I hate it. Why? Because I believe God expects it from me. I am an Orthodox Christian. As @skipsul can explain, Orthodox are in the middle of the two-week Dormition Fast, observing the death of Mary, mother of Jesus. It is one of four fast periods for the devout Orthodox observer, where we forgo meat and dairy (and usually fish).
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Quote of the Day: How Jews Harm Other Jews
“Dare I say it? I must. I implore Jews to stop fighting with one another. Even if we disagree, we must try to do so respectfully, soulfully. I am psychologically very sensitive to Jewish self-hatred and anti-Semitism within the Diaspora. I fear it may very well function as a fifth column. I do not, however, think that other Jews are my enemies. It is important for Jews to remember this. Even if all Jews saw eye-to-eye on everything, we would still have real enemies whose goal in life is to kill us and to drive a Jewish presence out of the Middle East.” — Phyllis Chesler, The New Anti-Semitism
I saw Phyllis Chesler give a talk at a conference in St. Petersburg, FL, several years ago. It was a conference on Islamism; unfortunately, they haven’t held the conference again. Some great people were there, whose warnings were prescient, many of which have manifested in the years since.
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