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October 6, 2017 § 4 Comments
“The quality of mercy is not strain’d
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes;
‘Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice.” — William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene I
“The power of just mercy is that it belongs to the undeserving. It’s when mercy is least expected that it’s most potent — strong enough to break the cycle of victimization and victimhood, retribution and suffering. It has the power to heal the cycle of psychic harm and injuries that lead to aggression and violence, abuse of power, mass incarceration.” — Bryan Stevenson
“If you want peace, work for justice.” — Pope Paul VI
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September 1, 2017 § 3 Comments
“Wherever we went, the soldiers came to kill us, and it was all our own country. It was ours already when the Wasichus [whites] made the treaty with Red Cloud that said it would be ours as long as grass should grow and water flow. That was only eight winters before, and they were chasing us now because we remembered and they forgot. We were not happy anymore, because so many of our people had untied their horses’ tails [left the warpath] and gone over to the Wasichus. We went back deep into our country. The bison had gone away, and a hard winter came early.” — Wooden Leg of the Cheyenne
“It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are — perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.” — Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce
“Accommodation had failed, War had failed. And the bullet-riven Ghost Shirts buried with their wearers in the mass grave on the lone knoll above Wounded Knee Creek were ample proof that religion too had failed the Indians. There was no room left for the Indians in the west but what the government saw fit to permit them. One elderly Lakota chief who had witnessed the march of events from the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1851 to the tragedy at Wounded Knee four decades later saw nothing remarkable in what had transpired. “The [government] made us many promises,” he told a white friend, “more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.” — Peter Cozzens, The Earth is Weeping
Photo courtesy of Ben McMurtray
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August 4, 2017 § 1 Comment
“No man can purchase his virtue too dear, for it is the only thing whose value must ever increase with the price it has cost us.” — Charles Caleb Colton
“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.” — Gautama Buddha
“The great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” — G. K. Chesterton
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July 7, 2017 § Leave a comment
“Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.” — Benjamin N. Cardozo, Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319, 327, (1937)
“I call that mind free, which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from heaven. I call that mind free, which sets no bounds to its love, which is not imprisoned in itself or in a sect, which recognises in all human beings the image of God and the rights of his children, which delights in virtue and sympathizes with suffering wherever they are seen, which conquers pride, anger, and sloth, and offers itself up a willing victim to the cause of mankind.” — William Ellery Channing
“Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one’s government is not necessarily to secure freedom.” — Friedrich Hayek
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June 2, 2017 § Leave a comment
“Honor is the presence of God in man.” — Pat Conroy, The Lords of Discipline
“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” — Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence
“”We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.” — C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
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May 5, 2017 § Leave a comment
“Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.” – Jane Addams
“One has a feeling that one has a kind of home in this timeless community of human beings that strive for truth. … I have always believed that Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God the small group scattered all through time of intellectually and ethically valuable people.” – Albert Einstein
“Divorced from ethics, leadership is reduced to management and politics, to mere technique.” – James MacGregor Burns
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April 7, 2017 § Leave a comment
“See everything; overlook a great deal; correct a little.” – Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, Pope John XXIII
“Not the power to remember, but its very opposite, the power to forget, is a necessary condition for our existence.” – Sholem Asch
“True tolerance remains mindful of the humanity of those who make things easy for themselves and welcomes and even loves honest and thoughtful opposition above less thoughtful agreement.” – Walter Kaufmann
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March 3, 2017 § Leave a comment
“It is better to be poor and walk in integrity than to be stupid and speak lies.” – Proverbs 19:1
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” – Robert J. Hanlon
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by the use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves in human beings a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reason falls on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical. And when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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February 3, 2017 § Leave a comment
“Under current law, it is a crime for a private citizen to lie to a government official, but not for a government official to lie to the people.” — Donald M. Fraser
“We have enjoyed so much freedom for so long that perhaps we are in danger of forgetting that the Bill of Rights, which cost so much blood to establish, is still worth fighting for.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
“I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.” — James Madison
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January 6, 2017 § 2 Comments
“Democracy is like a tambourine — not everybody can be trusted with it.” — John Oliver
“[America] is where the experiment is unfolding. This is really where the races confront one another, where the classes, where the genders, where even the sexual orientations confront one another. This is the real laboratory of democracy.” — Leonard Cohen
“Fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It’s something essentially splendid because it’s not all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live.” — Norman Mailer
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