“The more we orient ourselves toward practical and technical education adapted to the modern world, the more the child is being prepared to enter this modern world, but the more all true knowledge, all reflection, all opportunities of becoming conscious through anterior adaptation is kept from him.”

                 — Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion

“Godes mildheortnys us forestaepth, and his mildheortnys us fyligth.”  

“God’s mercy goes before us, and His mercy follows us.”

–– Aelfric, Homily on the Parable of the Vineyard

“Considering how much we are all given to discuss the characters of others, and discuss them often not in the strictest spirit of charity, it is singular how little we are inclined to think that others can speak ill-naturedly of us, and how angry and hurt we are when proof reaches us that they have done so.  It is hardly too much to say that we all of us occasionally speak of our dearest friends in a manner in which those dearest friends would very little like to hear themselves mentioned, and that we nevertheless expect that our dearest friends shall invariably speak of us as though they were blind to all our faults, but keenly alive to every shade of our virtues.”

— Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers, Chapter XX

Q:  What should we do?  – as a small, helpless people who seem to have no influence on the present confrontation between the powers?

A:  WE SHOULDN’T WORRY SO MUCH.

    —   Karl Barth; from an interview on Swiss radio, 1952;  quoted in                      Vernard Eller, Christian Anarchy.  

“I’m a Salt River roarer!  I’m a ring-tailed squealer!  I’m a reg’lar screamer from the ol’ Massassip’!  WHOOP!  I’m the very infant that refused his milk before its eyes were open, and called out for a bottle of old Rye!  I love the women an’ I’m chockful o’ fight!  I’m half wild horse and half cock-eyed alligator and the rest o’ me is crooked snags an’ red-hot snappin’ turtle.  I can hit like fourth-proof lightnin’ an’ every lick I make in the woods lets in an acre o’ sunshine.  I can out-run, out-jump, out-shoot, out-brag, out-drink, an’ out-fight, rough-an’-tumble, no holts barred, ary man on both sides the river from Pittsburgh to New Orleans an’ back agin to St. Louiee.  Come on you flatters, you bargers, you milk-white mechanics, an’ see how tough I am to chaw!  I ain’t had a fight for two days an’ I’m spilein’ for exercise.  Cock-a-doodle-do!”   

— From Mike Fink, King of Mississippi Keelboatmen, by Walter Blair and Franklin J. Meine, pp. 105-106.  Copy 1933 by Henry Holt & Company, Inc.  New York.

“Diversion.   If man were happy,  the less he were diverted the happier he would be, like the saints of God.  Yes: but is a man not happy who can find delight in diversion?

“No: because it comes from somewhere else, from outside; so he is dependent, and always liable to be disturbed by a thousand and one accidents, which inevitably cause distress.”      

— Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 132 (170)

“… How stupid everything is!  And war multiplies the stupidity by 3 and its power by itself; so one’s precious days are ruled by (3x)2 when x = normal human crassitude (and that’s bad enough).” 

                                                                               — J.R.R. Tolkien, Letters, #61 

“At some point it becomes far from asinine to speak of the god of Technology – in the sense that people believe technology works, that they rely on it, that it makes promises, that they are bereft when denied access to it, that they are delighted when they are in its presence, that for most people it works in mysterious ways, that they condemn people who speak against it, that they stand in awe of it, and that, in the born-again mode, they will alter their lifestyles, their schedules, their habits, and their relationships to accommodate it.  If this be not a form of religious belief, what is?”

                                   — Neil Postman      

“Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilization.”

      — William Morris, News from Nowhere and Other Writings, 381.  (1894) 

“In human art, Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature … Visible presentation of the fantastic image is technically too easy; the hand tends to outrun the mind, even to overthrow it.  Silliness and morbidity are frequent results.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories”

“Nothing can be more disastrous than the view that the cinema can and should replace popular written fiction.  The elements which it excludes are precisely those which give the untrained mind its only access to the imaginative world.  There is death in the camera.”

     — C.S. Lewis, “On Stories”  

It is assumed by most people nowadays that all work is useful, and by most well-to-do people that all work is desirable.   Most people, well-to-to or not, believe that, even when a man is doing work which appears to be useless, he is earning his livelihood by it — he is ’employed’ as the phrase goes; and most of those who are well-to-do cheer on the happy worker with congratulations and praises, if he is ‘industrious’ enough and deprives himself of all pleasure and holidays in the sacred cause of labor.  In short, it has become an article of the creed of modern morality that all labor is good in itself — a convenient belief to those who live on the labor of others.  But as to those by whom they live, I recommend them not to take it on trust, but to look into the matter a little deeper.

        — William Morris, “Useful Work versus Useless Toil.”     

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

— Samuel Johnson (the great English lexicographer), April 7, 1775

“Stories that tell of men’s aspirations for more than material life can give them — their struggles for the future welfare of their race, their unselfish love, their unrequited service:  things like this are the subjects for the best art; in such subjects there is hope surely, yet the aspect of them is likely to be sorrowful enough:  defeat the seed of victory, and death the seed of life, will be shown on the face of most of them.”

— William Morris, “Some Hints on Pattern-Designing”