"If you take your time with a journey, you have a much better chance of finding, again, that the journey itself is the destination and not some distant city or goal; that if you can accept that you need to pass through the uglier parts of the landscape to get to the highlands and the vistas, they will in time appear again. But if you try to take the fast route, the route that leads around all the clutter and slash of our disposable culture, you will in the end have seen little and understood less, you will be traveling on the bland Highway 5s that always run into the dark end of nowhere special."
-Gerard Van der Leun

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin

"Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things."
-Adam Smith

"We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle."
-Winston Churchill

"When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."
-Benjamin Franklin

"I imagined how very frustrated (he) would have been had he been forced to watch the code he helped develop just die on the shelf. Never underestimate the strength of the human passion to create, and to see one's creations bloom in the light of day."
-Christian Einfeldt

"Absolutism in any field can be frightening, and never more so than religious absolutism. There is a critical difference between Christian absolutism and Christian certainty. Absolutism claims that an assertion is absolutely true. Absolute truth leaves no room for doubt or dissent; you disagree at peril of suffering at the hands of true believers.
Religious absolutists have been found in every tradition, even Buddhism has experienced the same kind of violent adherents that Islam now suffers from, and so has Christianity.
But Christian certainty is different. Christian certainty makes room for doubt or dissent, if for no other reason than we have Thomas’ example in John 20.
The Christian call is not to claim an absolute truth. To say one knows an absolute truth is an astonishingly arrogant claim. It says much more about what one thinks about oneself than what one knows about truth. Can any of us really claim, 'I and I alone know what is true. The rest of you are in darkness'? Surely not!"
-Donald Sensing

"In recent years the range of such interventions has vastly expanded to the point of creating a new type of state, the so-called "welfare state"... Malfunctions and defects in the social-assistance state are the result of an inadequate understanding of the task proper to the state."
"By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the social-assistance state leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending."
"Socialism considers the individual person simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socioeconomic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good and evil."
"People lose sight of the fact that life in society has neither the market nor the state as its final purpose, since life itself has a unique value which the state and the market must serve."
-Pope John Paul II

"Imagine ghosts, gods and devils.
Imagine hells and heavens, cities floating in the sky and cities sunken in the sea
Unicorns and centaurs. Witches, warlocks, jinns and banshees.
Angels and harpies. Charms and incantations. Elementals, farmiliars, demons.
Easy to imagine all of those things: mankind has been imagining them for thousands of years.
Imagine spaceships and the future.
Easy to imagine; the future is really coming and there'll be spaceships in it.
Is there then anything that's really hard to imagine?
Of course there is.
Imagine a piece of matter and yourself inside it, yourself, aware, thinking and therefore knowing you exist, able to move that piece of matter that you're in, to make it sleep or wake, make love or walk uphill.
Imagine a universe-infinite or not, as you wish to picture it- with a billion, billion, billion suns in it.
Imagine a blob of mud whirling madly around one of those suns.
Imagine yourself standing on that blob of mud, whirling with it, whirling through time and space to an unknown destination.
Imagine!"
-Fredric Brown, 1955

"I am not much of a believer, but I find it hard not to suspect some providential hand at play when the white smoke went up at the Vatican 27 years ago and the Polish cardinal was chosen to lead the Catholic Church. Precisely at the moment that the West most desperately needed it, we were sent a champion. It is hard to remember now how dark those days were. The 15 months following the pope's elevation marked the high tide of Soviet communism and the nadir of the free world's post-Vietnam collapse."
-Charles Krauthammer