Posted at www.Dads.org, a newsletter from Steve Wood. This was from Newsletter May 2018, Vol. 24, No. 2. I recommend subscribing to his newsletter for Catholic men, fathers and citizens.
Notable Quotations
Editor’s note: In this letter, I’m sharing from my collection of quotations on a wide variety of subjects and authors.
Attracting the Young
“You will never attract the young by making Christianity easy, but a good many can be attracted by finding it difficult: difficult both to the disorderly mind and to the unruly passions.”
— T.S. Eliott, (After the 1931 Lambeth Assembly of Anglican bishops approved of birth control use for the first time in Christian history.)
Giving Money to People Who Refuse to Work
“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”
— Thomas Jefferson
Reflections of an English Bishop
“An English bishop reflected: ‘Wherever St. Paul went, there was a riot. Wherever I go, they serve tea.’ In spiritual combat, there is no teatime, and effective strategies cannot be plotted at conferences, workshops, and costly conventions at resort hotels with multiple ‘break-out’ sessions and mellow music. One fears that a fly on the wall at any of those conversations would drop to the floor out of boredom.”
— Source unknown
Who Are You to Judge?
“Only God can judge the state of the human soul, but it is pure nonsense to suggest we cannot and should not judge human behavior. Reluctance to judge moral behavior is the inevitable consequence of moral relativism and moral subjectivism that has eroded confidence in the ability to determine objective moral truth on which sound judgment is based.”
— Bishop Fred Henry (retired), Alberta
What Men Did After Church in Colonial VA
“In 1632, the Virginia Assembly advised every man to carry a gun to church in order to train with it after the service.”
— Source unknown
Going with the Flow?
“A dead thing goes with the stream; only a living thing goes against it.”
— G.K. Chesterton
The Fort Betrayed
“The fort is betrayed even by them that should have defended it.”
— St. John Fisher watching in disbelief as clergy submitted to Henry VIII
Sinful Silence
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
— Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer before his execution by the Nazis
The Memory Hole
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
—George Orwell, 1984
Reading Advice
“A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”
— C.S. Lewis
“Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers.”
— Harry S. Truman
Guidance Prayer
“Lord, help me to want to be what you want me to be.”
— Dominican Sister
No-nonsense Marital Advice
“If you don’t straighten out your marriage when the war’s over, I’ll come down from Heaven and kick you in the ass.”
— Fr. Emil Kapaun to a fellow POW, before being led to the infamous “death house” in North Korea’s Pyoktong prison camp.