Saturday

Miscellaneous Passages

"True freedom comes only to a lucid mind unbound by conventional wisdom and suspicious of received opinions." Joseph Epstein, on the thought of George Santayana

"[H]umanitarians have an intense hatred of mankind as it is." Santayana

"Santayana says that, as we approach death, the world itself begins to look dark to us because we cannot imagine it being much good without us in it." Joseph Epstein

"The most interesting American political figures cannot be squeezed into the constricted and lifeless pens of liberal or conservative." Bill Kauffman, Ain't My America

"You can have your hometown or you can have the empire. You can't have both." Bill Kauffman, Ain't My America

John Randolph was kicked out of William and Mary for dueling over the correct pronunciation of a word.

John Randolph referred to Kentucky as the "Australia of Virginia."

"No government, extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific, can be fit to govern me or those whom I represent." John Randolph

"Never make people laugh. If you would succeed in life, you must be solemn, solemn as an ass. All the great monuments are built over solemn asses." Senator Thomas Corwin

In John Wu's "well-known translation of the New Testament he opens the Gospel of St. John with the words, 'In the beginning was the Tao.'" Thomas Merton, "A Christian Looks at Zen."

"You can hardly set Christianity and Zen side by side and compare them. This would almost be like trying to compare mathematics and tennis." Thomas Merton

"Whatever years be behind us are in death's hands." Seneca