Catholics From The United States

"When you look at the conduct that has taken place by Jimmy Kimmel, um, it appears to be some of the sickest conduct possible. Uh, as you've indicated, there are, y'know, avenues here for the FCC so there are some ways in which I need to be a little bit, uh, careful: because we could be called ultimately to be a judge on some of these claims that come up. But I don't think this is an isolated incident. You go back to Representative Swalwell, he had a tweet out last week, where he was saying that, y'know, emphasizing that Charlie Kirk's killer was "a straight white male from Republican family that voted for Donald Trump." In some quarters there's a very concerted effort to try to lie to the American people.about the nature, as you indicated, one of the most significant, uh, newsworthy public interest acts that we've seen in a long time. In what appears to be an action by Jimmy Kimmel to play into that narrative that this was somehow a MAGA or Republican motivated person. If that's what happened here with his conduct, that's really really sick."

"But you have to recognize the fact that, critically, Jimmy is great at what he does, and I think he's doing some of the best comedy in late night. I'm a very big fan."

"We've always known Jimmy's had a great deal of raw talent. It's exciting watching him use that talent to become such a dynamic and gifted late night host. The sky is the limit for Jimmy and this show."

"He's a very driven, very focused and very dedicated guy, and it's basically like a dictatorship working with him. He's not scared to tell you that your idea sucks."

"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it."

"There was a moment over the weekend, a very beautiful moment. I don't know if you saw this on Sunday. Erika Kirk forgave the man who shot her husband. She forgave him. That is an example we should follow. If you believe in the teachings of Jesus as I do, there it was. That's, that's it. A selfless act of grace, forgiveness from a grieving widow. It touched me deeply, and I hope it touches many, and if there's anything we should take from this tragedy to carry forward, I hope it can be that and not this."

"I never imagined I would be in a situation like this. I barely paid attention in school. But one thing I did learn from Lenny Bruce and George Carlin and Howard Stern is that a government threat to silence a comedian the president doesn't like is anti-American. That's anti-American. And I am so glad we have some solidarity on that from the right and the left and from those in the middle like Joe Rogan. Maybe the silver lining from this is we found one thing we can agree on, and maybe we'll even find another one. Maybe we can get a little bit closer together. We do agree on a lot of things. We agree on keeping our children safe from guns, on reproductive rights for women, Social Security, affordable health care, pediatric cancer research. These are all things that most Americans support. Let's stop letting these politicians tell us what they want and tell them what we want."

"The president of the United States made it very clear he wants to see me and the hundreds of people who work here fired from our jobs. Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can't take a joke. He was somehow able to squeeze Colbert out of CBS. Then he turned his sights on me, and now he's openly rooting for NBC to fire Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers and the hundreds of Americans who work for their shows who don't make millions of dollars. And I hope that if that happens or if there's even any hint of that happening, you will be 10 times as loud as you were this week. We have to speak out against this because he's not stopping. And it's not just comedy. He's gunning for our journalists, too. He's suing them. He's bullying them. Over the weekend, his Foxy friend Pete Hegseth announced a new policy that requires journalists with Pentagon press credentials to sign a pledge, promising not to report information that hasn't been explicitly authorized for release. That includes unclassified information. They want to pick and choose what the news is. I know that's not as interesting as muscling a comedian, but it's so important to have a free press, and it is nuts that we aren't paying more attention to it."

"I've been fortunate to work at a company that has allowed me to do the show the way we want to do it for almost 23 years. I've done almost 4,000 shows on ABC. And over that time, the people who run this network have allowed me to evolve and to stretch the boundaries of what was once traditional for a late night talk show, even when it made them uncomfortable, which I do a lot. Every night, they've defended my right to poke fun at our leaders and to advocate for subjects that I think are important by allowing me to use their platform. And I am very grateful for that. With that said, I was not happy when they pulled me off the air on Wednesday. I did not agree with that decision and I told them that and we had many conversations. I shared my point of view. They shared theirs. We talked it through and at the end, even though they didn't have to — they really didn't have to, this is a giant company, we have short attention spans and I am a tiny part of the Disney Corporation — they welcomed me back on the air and I thank them for that because I know that unfortunately and, I think, unjustly, this puts them at risk."

"I am a person who gets a lot of threats. I get many ugly and scary threats against my life, my wife, my kids, my co-workers because of what I choose to say. And I know those threats don't come from the kind of people on the right who I know and love. So that's what I wanted to say on that subject. But I don't want to make this about me, because — and I know this is what people say when they make things about them, but I really don't — this show, this show is not important. What is important is that we get to live in a country that allows us to have a show like this. I've had the opportunity to meet and spend time with comedians and talk show hosts from countries like Russia, countries in the Middle East who tell me they would get thrown in prison for making fun of those in power. And worse than being thrown in prison. They know how lucky we are here. Our freedom to speak is what they admire most about this country. And that's something I'm embarrassed to say I took for granted until they pulled my friend Stephen off the air and tried to coerce the affiliates who run our show in the cities that you live in to take my show off the air. That's not legal. That's not American. That is un-American and it is so dangerous."

"I understand that to some that felt either ill-timed or unclear or maybe both. And for those who think I did point a finger, I get why you're upset. If the situation was reversed, there's a good chance I'd have felt the same way. I have many friends and family members on the other side who I love and remain close to even though we don't agree on politics at all. I don't think the murderer who shot Charlie Kirk represents anyone. This was a sick person who believed violence was a solution, and it isn't it, ever."

"I've been hearing a lot about what I need to say and do tonight. And the truth is I don't think what I have to say is going to make much of a difference. If you like me, you like me. If you don't, you don't. I have no illusions about changing anyone's mind. But I do want to make something clear because it's important to me as a human. And that is you understand that it was never my intention to make light of the murder of a young man. I don't — I don't think there's anything funny about it. I posted a message on Instagram on the day he was killed sending love to his family and asking for compassion and I meant it and I still do. Nor was it my intention to blame any specific group for the actions of what … was obviously a deeply disturbed individual. That was really the opposite of the point I was trying to make."

"Even though I don't agree with many of those people on most subjects — some of the things they say even make me want to throw up — it takes courage for them to speak out against this administration, and they did, and they deserve credit for it. And thanks for telling your followers that our government cannot be allowed to control what we do and do not say on television and that we have to stand up to it."

"Anyway, as I was saying before I was interrupted, if you're just joining us, we're preempting your regularly scheduled encore episode of Celebrity Family Feud to bring you this special report. I'm happy to be here tonight with you. Please be seated. I'm not sure who had a weirder 48 hours: me or the CEO of Tylenol. It's been overwhelming. I've heard from a lot of people over the last six days. I've heard from all the people in the world over the last six days. Anyone I have ever met has reached out 10 or 11 times."

"Many in MAGA-land are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk.""

"We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it."

"Perfecto. He is going to buy that swing-state $100 bill at a time. Its nice to see him paying someone who isn't a porn star for a change"

"I'm not seen as classy enough to host the Oscars."

"There were a lot of people who didn't think we'd get to this milestone."

"Though it makes me sick to do so without my writers, there are more than a hundred people whose financial well-being depends on our show. It is time to go back to work."

"There's something comforting and pleasurable about watching people win money."

"I'm on the Internet a lot more than I watch TV and most everybody I know is, and yet if you watch most late-night talk shows, it's as if it doesn't even exist. So the Internet, it's just something I wanted to make use of in some way. I was fascinated by what appeared to be a child singing this song. It just struck me as funny."

"I believe that David Letterman is the greatest talk show host that ever hosted a talk show. He'd be the last person to say that and he'd probably be horrified to hear that, but I really do believe that. Anything I do, I feel, is a pale imitation at best of what he does. I just try to do whatever I can not to imitate him, because that is the inclination when you idolize somebody, when you watch the show every night growing up as a kid."

"I don't believe that lack of intelligence and appreciation for lowbrow comedy go hand-in-hand necessarily."

""To be perfectly honest with you, ABC picks you to do this and then the machine goes into action and you shoot promos. But I'm still sitting in my bedroom at home going, 'Jeez, I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I'm going to be able to do it.' And it's a weird situation to be in. And I guess we'll all find out."

"I'm excited, but I am also realistic. I have seen what happened to the people who came before me and failed. It's an unforgiving arena to be in."

"We use puppets because they can get away with more."

"We wanted to figure out a way to get crank phone calls on television. Watching someone on TV talking on a phone isn't that entertaining, and obviously we couldn't send a camera crew around to the people getting the calls, so it was limited to either animation or puppets. And puppets seemed halfway between cartoons and people, so that seemed like the most real way that we could do it."

"The monks of the earliest days had not counted on the human ability to generate a new cultural inheritance in a couple of generations if an old one is utterly destroyed, to generate it by virtue of lawgivers and prophets, geniuses or maniacs; through a Moses, or through a Hitler, or an ignorant but tyrannical grandfather, a cultural inheritance may be acquired between dusk and dawn, and many have been so acquired. But the new "culture" was an inheritance of darkness, wherein "simpleton" meant the same thing as "citizen" meant the same thing as "slave." The monks waited. It mattered not at all to them that the knowledge they saved was useless, that much of it was not really knowledge now, was as inscrutable to the monks in some instances as it would be to an illiterate wild-boy from the hills; this knowledge was empty of content, its subject matter long since gone. Still, such knowledge had a symbolic structure that was peculiar to itself, and at least the symbol-interplay could be observed. To observe the way a knowledge-system is knit together is to learn at least a minimum knowledge-of-knowledge, until someday — someday, or some century — an Integrator would come, and things would be fitted together again. So time mattered not at all. The Memorabilia was there, and it was given to them by duty to preserve, and preserve it they would if the darkness in the world lasted ten more centuries, or even ten thousand years..."

"The last monk, upon entering, paused in the lock. He stood in the open hatchway and took off his sandals. "Sic transit mundus," he murmured, looking back at the glow. He slapped the soles of his sandals together, beating the dirt out of them."

"They sang as they lifted the children into the ship. They sang old space chanteys and helped the children up the ladder one at a time and into the hands of the sisters. They sang heartily to dispel the fright of the little ones. When the horizon erupted, the singing stopped. They passed the last child into the ship. The horizon came alive with flashes as the monks mounted the ladder. The horizons became a red glow. A distant cloudbank was born where no cloud had been. The monks on the ladder looked away from the flashes. When the flashes were gone, they looked back. The visage of Lucifer mushroomed into hideousness above the cloudbank, rising slowly like some titan climbing to its feet after ages of imprisonment in the Earth."

"The image of those cool green eyes lingered with him as long as life. He did not ask why God would choose to raise up a creature of primal innocence from the shoulder of Mrs. Grales, or why God gave to it the preternatural gifts of Eden — these gifts which Man had been trying to seize by brute force again from Heaven since first he lost them. He had seen primal innocence in those eyes, and a promise of resurrection. One glimpse had been a bounty, and he wept in gratitude. Afterwards he lay with his face in the wet dirt and waited. Nothing else ever came — nothing that he saw, or felt, or heard."

"He received the Wafer from her hand. She replaced the lid of the ciborium and set the vessel in a more protected spot under a jutting rock. She used no conventional gestures, but the reverence with which she had handled it convinced him of one thing: she sensed the Presence under the veils. She who could not yet use words nor understand them, had done what she had as if by direct instruction, in response to his attempt at conditional baptism. He tried to refocus his eyes to get another look at the face of this being, who by gestures alone had said to him: I do not need your first Sacrament, Man, but I am worthy to convey to you this Sacrament of Life. Now he knew what she was, and he sobbed faintly when he could not again force his eyes to focus on those cool, green, and untroubled eyes of one born free."

"She watched him with cool green eyes and smiled innocently. The eyes were alert with wonder, curiosity, and — perhaps something else — but she could apparently not see that he was in pain. There was something about her eyes that caused him to notice nothing else for several seconds. But then he noticed that the head of Mrs. Grales slept soundly on the other shoulder while Rachel smiled. It seemed a young shy smile that hoped for friendship. He tried again. "Listen, is anyone else alive? Get —" Melodious and solemn came her answer: "listen is anyone else alive — " She savored the words. She enunciated them distinctly. She smiled over them Her lips reframed them when her voice was done with them. It was more than reflexive imitation, he decided. She was trying to communicate something. By the repetition, she was trying to convey the idea: I am somehow like you. But she had only just now been born. And you're somehow different, too, Zerchi noticed with a trace of awe."

"To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law — a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security."

"When Holy Church occasionally hinted that she still considered her authority to be supreme over all nations and superior to the authority of states, men in these times tended to snicker."

"Abbot Zerchi smiled thinly. 'You don't have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.'"

"The abbot snapped off the set. "Where’s the truth”? he asked quietly. “What’s to be believed? Or does it matter at all? When mass murder’s been answered with mass murder, rape with rape, hate with hate, there’s no longer much meaning in asking whose ax is the bloodier. Evil, on evil, piled on evil. Was there any justification in our ‘police action’ in space? How can we know? Certainly there was no justification for what they did — or was there? We only know what that thing says, and that thing is a captive. The Asian radio has to say what will least displease its government; ours has to say what will least displease our fine patriotic opinionated rabble, which is what, coincidentally, the government wants it to say anyhow, so where’s the difference?""

"Listen, are we helpless? Are we doomed to do it again and again and again? Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk: Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America — burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again. Are we doomed to it, Lord, chained to the pendulum of our own mad clockwork, helpless to halt its swing? This time, it will swing us clean to oblivion, he thought."

"We are being protected from hysteria. Isn't that what they call it? Maniacs! The world's been in a habitual state of crisis for fifty years. Fifty? What am I saying? It's been in a habitual state of crisis since the beginning — but for half a century now, almost unbearable. And why, for the love of God? What is the fundamental irritant, the essence of the tension? Political philosophies? Economics? Population pressure? Disparity of culture and creed? Ask a dozen experts, get a dozen answers. Now Lucifer again. Is the species congenitally insane, Brother?"

"The Poet could not remember ever fearing death, but he had often suspected Providence of plotting the worst for him as to the manner of his dying when the time came to go. He had expected to rot away. Slowly and not very fragrantly. Some poetic insight had warned him that he would surely die a blubbering leprous lump, cravenly penitential but impenitent. Never had he anticipated anything so blunt and final as a bullet in the stomach, and with not even an audience at hand to hear his dying quips. The last thing they had heard him say when they shot him was: "Oof!" — his testament for posterity. Ooof!"

"He was a very dispirited Poet. He had never expected the world to act in a courteous, seemly, or even sensible manner, and the world had seldom done so; often he had taken heart in the consistency of its rudeness and stupidity. But never before had the world shot the Poet in the abdomen with a musket. This he found not heartening at all."

"But neither infinite power nor infinite wisdom could bestow godhood upon men. For that there would have to be infinite love as well."

"If you try to save wisdom until the world is wise, Father, the world will never have it."

"One never knows whether the Poet is speaking fact, fancy, or allegory. If fancy is clever enough, I doubt that the Poet would admit a difference between fancy and fact."

"Ignorance is king. Many would not profit by his abdication. Many enrich themselves by means of his dark monarchy. They are his Court, and in his name they defraud and govern, enrich themselves and perpetuate their power. Even literacy they fear, for the written word is another channel of communication that might cause their enemies to become united. Their weapons are keen-honed, and they use them with skill. They will press the battle upon the world when their interests are threatened, and the violence which follows will last until the structure of society as it now exists is leveled to rubble, and a new society emerges. I am sorry: But that is how I see it."

"Ignorance has been our king. Since the death of empire, he sits unchallenged on the throne of Man. His dynasty is age-old. His right to rule is now considered legitimate. Past sages have affirmed it. They did nothing to unseat him. "Tomorrow, a new prince shall rule. Men of understanding, men of science shall stand behind his throne, and the universe will come to know his might. His name is Truth. His empire shall encompass the Earth. And the mastery of Man ever the Earth shall be renewed. A century from now, men will fly through the air in mechanical birds. Metal carriages will race along roads of man-made stone. There will be buildings of thirty stories, ships that go under the sea, machines to perform all works. "And how will this come to pass?" He paused and lowered his voice. "In the same way all change comes to pass, I fear. And I am sorry it is so. It will come to pass by violence and upheaval, by flame and by fury, for no change comes calmly over the world."

"Reasoning which touches experimental reality nowhere is the business of angelologists and theologians, not of physical scientists. And yet such papers as these describe systems which touch our experience nowhere. Were they within the experimental reach of the ancients? Certain references tend to indicate it. One paper refers to elemental transmutation — which we just recently established as theoretically impossible — and then it says — 'experiment proves.' But how? It may take generations to evaluate and understand some of these things. It is unfortunate that they must remain here in this inaccessible place, for it will take a concentrated effort by numerous scholars to make meaning of them."

"Objective evidence is the ultimate authority. Recorders may lie, but Nature is incapable of it."

"He had never seen a "Fallout," and he hoped he'd never see one. A consistent description of the monster had not survived, but Francis had heard the legends. He crossed himself and backed away from the hole. Tradition told that the Beatus Leibowitz himself had encountered a Fallout, and had been possessed by it for many months before the exorcism which accompanied his Baptism drove the fiend away. Brother Francis visualized a Fallout as half-salamander, because, according to tradition, the thing was born in the Flame Deluge, and as half-incubus who despoiled virgins in their sleep, for, were not the monsters of the world still called "children of the Fallout"? That the demon was capable of inflicting all the woes which descended upon Job was recorded fact, if not an article of creed."