Right Libertarians From The United States

"From 280,000-750,000, Armenians initially raised their death count to 800,000 to test the credibility waters. ... They are now testing the waters at 2.5-3 million killed as their chances for a congressional genocide resolution recede. It speaks volumes that champions of the inflated death figures have no explanation for why Armenians on the scene would have erred. Think of the absurdity of discarding the current death count of Afghan civilians in the United States-Afghan war in favor of a number deduced in the year 2109!"

"Armenians have a genuine tale of woe. It largely overlaps with the tale of tragedy and suffering that can be told by Ottoman Muslims during the war years."

"In parts of Europe, disbelief in the Armenian genocide allegation is a crime on par with Holocaust denial. But the Holocaust was proven before the Nuremburg Tribunal with the trappings of due process. Armenians, in contrast, have forgone bringing their genocide allegation before the International Court of Justice because it is unsupported by historical facts."

"Best contemporaneous estimates place the number of Armenians who died in the war and its aftermath at between 150,000 and 600,000. The Armenian death count climbed to 1.5 million over the years on the back of political clout and propaganda."

"Congress does act slowly, often without foresight, and in ways detrimental to efficient government. But our entire consitutional scheme of checks and balances is intended to curb swift government action and to subordinate efficiency concerns to safeguard liberty and freedom."

"The Mass is a priviledged encounter with Jesus Christ. Christianity is not a philosophy, is not a social theory, is not an ideology, Christianity is a relationship with Christ, it is a friendship with Him. Everything in Christianity relates to and comes back to that friendship. What's the Mass? The Mass is the most intense way to see the ethernity that we can commune with Jesus."

"There is a regrettable interpretation of the cross that has, unfortunately, infected the minds of many Christians. This is the view that the bloody sacrifice of the Son on the cross was “satisfying” to the Father, and appeasement of a God infinitely angry at sinful humanity. In this reading, the crucified Jesus is like a child hurled into the fiery mouth of a pagan divinity in order to assuage its wrath. But what ultimately refutes this twisted theology is the well-known passage from John’s Gospel: “God so loved the world, that he sent his only Son, that all who believe in him might have eternal life.” John reveals that it is not out of anger or vengeance or in a desire for retribution that the Father sends the Son, but precisely out of love. God the Father is not some pathetic divinity whose bruised personal honor needs to be restored; rather God is a parent who burns with compassion for his children who have wandered into danger."

"God created the world through an active speech. God's Word is not descriptive, it is creative. God speaks the worls is being...God's Word changes, it is effective, makes things happen...What God says, is. If Jesus is just a spiritual teacher among many, one great religious figure, okay, fine. But there are thousands of those. What claims the Church is He is not a human figure amomg many, but He is the Word made flesh. The very embodiement of God [as a] transformative and creative work. The night before he dies, that Jesus took bread, the Pasqual bead, and said: "This is my Body." Taking the goblet with the meal, said: "This is the chalice of my Blood". If that [was said] by a human being, a great hero, a philosopher, a social reformer, okay, we say: "He is using a symbolic talk." But who is saying that? The Word made flesh. The Word whose speech constitutes reality at the deepest level. Just as if God spokes you to be, so Jesus speaks His presence into being, over the appearence of bread and wine...We move into His very identity at that point. We now commence to speak in the first person, saying: "Take this, all of you, and eat it. This is my Body given for you." We speak in persona Christi, we speak in the very Word of Jesus."

"In the society of Jesus’s time, physical illness was typically construed as a curse, and in many cases sickness or deformity prevented one from participating fully in the life of the community, especially in common worship. Curing the blind, the deaf, the lame, and the leprous, Jesus was Yahweh binding up the wounds of his people and restoring them to communion."

"Paul consistently proclaimed that the church of Jesus Christ is not so much an organization as an organism, a mystical body. I will present the church accordingly as a living thing, whose purpose is to gather the whole world into the praise of God. And the central act of the church, its “source and summit” in the words of Vatican II, is the Liturgy, the ritualized praise of God. I will therefore walk through the gestures, songs, movements, and theology of the Liturgy. The entire purpose of the Liturgy and the church is to make saints, to make people holy. This is why Catholicism takes the saints, in all their wild diversity, with such seriousness and why it presents them to us with such enthusiasm."

"The ISIS barbarians were actually quite right in entitling their video “A Message Written in Blood.” Up and down the centuries, tyrants and their lackeys have thought that they could wipe out the followers of Jesus through acts of violence. But as Tertullian observed long ago, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. And they were furthermore right in sending their message to “the Nation of the Cross.” But they should know that the cross taunts them."

"I will confess that my two forays into the Reddit space have been more than a little discouraging. If you dare, look at the dismaying number of just plain aggressive and mean-spirited comments."

"The denial of God conduced to the denial of God-given rights – and that, in turn, conduced to rights becoming eminently alienable whenever it served the purposes of the government."

"Essential to the Catholic mind is what I would characterize as a keen sense of the prolongation of the Incarnation throughout space and time, an extension that is made possible through the mystery of the church. Catholics see God’s continued enfleshment in the oil, water, bread, imposed hands, wine, and salt of the sacraments; they appreciate it in the gestures, movements, incensations, and songs of the Liturgy; they savor it in the texts, arguments, and debates of the theologians; they sense it in the graced governance of popes and bishops; they love it in the struggles and missions of the saints; they know it in the writings of Catholic poets and in the cathedrals crafted by Catholic architects, artists, and workers. In short, all of this discloses to the Catholic eye and mind the ongoing presence of the Word made flesh, namely Christ."

"The Catholic Church’s job is to call people to sanctity and to equip them for living saintly lives. Its mission is not to produce nice people, or people with hearts of gold, or people with good intentions; its mission is to produce saints, people of heroic virtue…To dial down the demands because they are hard, and most people have a hard time realizing them, is to compromise the very meaning and purpose of the Church. However, here’s the flip side. The Catholic Church couples its extraordinary moral demand with an extraordinarily lenient penitential system. The Church mediates the infinite mercy of God to those who fail to live up to that ideal (which means practically everyone). This is why its forgiveness is so generous and so absolute. To grasp both of these extremes is to understand the Catholic approach to morality."

"So much American science fiction is parochial -- not as true now as it was years ago, but the assumption is one culture in the future, more or less like ours, and with the same ideals, the same notions of how to do things, just bigger and flashier technology. Well, you know darn well it doesn't work that way..."

"I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated."

"I wrote the first book, Harvest of Stars, and as I was writing it, I saw that certain implications had barely been touched on... It's perfectly obvious that two completely revolutionary things are going on, with cybernetics, and biological science."

"I've heard assorted rhapsodies about humankind going to the stars, of course. Who hasn't? Each of them founders on the practical problems." "The fish that first ventured ashore had considerable practical problems."

"The universe held as many surprises as it did stars. No, more. That was its glory. But someday one of them was bound to kill you."

"Light fills the air, wind is aglow, drink of it, breathe of it, make leafing. Rainfall sows itself, it grows down through soil to the secret places where stones abide; it brings the strength of them up rootward. Lie still, molder away, then be again grass."

"In Harvest of Stars, there is this notion, not original with me of course, that it will become possible to download at least the basic aspects of a human personality into a machine program..."

"Are you happy? Your question is meaningless. I am occupied. I participate in operations, I am one with the accomplishments."

"“‘Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ Yeah, trouble is, the three classes of people aren’t the same.”"

"“We do need something to lift us out of ourselves. It’s wrong to carry our pettinesses along to the stars.” “We will, though,” he said. “We can’t help it. How do you escape being what you are?”"

"It would annoy me less that we’re heading into a new puritanical era if the puritanism concerned itself about things that matter."

"Well, everybody got stupid now and then, especially in war."

"“Well, I’ll try to sketch it out for you, but I’ll have to repeat stuff I’ve told you before.” “That’s all right. I’m a simon-pure layman. My basic thought habits were formed early in the Iron Age. Where it comes to science, I can use plenty of repetition.”"

"I don’t pretend to understand what the physicists mean by time, but for people, it isn’t so-and-so many measured units; it’s events, experiences. A man who crowds his life and dies young has lived longer than one who got old sitting in tame sameness."

"She seldom bothered taking revenge. Time did that for her, eventually."

"I also know you cannot pick and choose. Change is a medicine bundle. You must refuse it altogether, or take the whole thing."

"“Your Eminence is as great a man as I have ever met.” “Then God have mercy on humankind,” Richelieu replied."

"Who can make a medicine against time?"

"Think. You have had your dealings with our bureaucracy. It is impossible not to, especially if one is a foreigner. Believe me, when we set our minds to it we can tangle, obstruct, and bring to a dead halt a herd of stampeding elephants."

"I never set myself up as a prophet. Those crazy preachers have been the death of thousands, and the end is not yet."

"I’ve seen so many gods come and go, what’s one more?"

"Corruption rewards its favorites with jobs."

"“Is that all he wants?” McCready wondered. “Shuffling papers in an office, forever?”"

"Once this was a free country. Oh, I always knew that couldn’t last, that here too things were bound to grind back to the norm—masters and serfs, whatever names they go by. And so far we continue happier than most of the world ever was. But damn, modern democracy has the technology to regiment us beyond anything Caesar, Torquemada, Suleyman, or Louis XIV dared dream of."

"No amount of money would stave off a nuclear warhead."

"Something as biologically fundamental as death ought to be in the very fabric of evolution virtually from the beginning."

"“Evolution is cut-and-try. If I may anthropomorphize,” he added. “Often it’s hard not to.”"

"We Russians have learned to fear anarchy above all else. We would rather have tyranny than it. Hanno, you do wrong to look on people’s republics, strong governments of every kind, as always evil. Freedom is perhaps better, but chaos is worse."

"Absolute proof of absolute knowledge is impossible."

"I have learned much in two thousand years, but nothing about any gods, except that they too, arise, change, age, and die. Whatever there is beyond the universe, if anything, I doubt it concerns itself with us."

"He had intended to say that such was the nature of power. Seizing it and holding it were alike filthy."

"Anybody can find infinite Mandelbrot figures in his navel."

"All those agonizing philosophical-theological conundrums amount to "Ask a silly question, get a silly answer.""

"If you continue a liar, you are as skillful a one as I have found in a wide experience."

"That is forgotten, their wars and their deeds and their very speech. Wisdom lasts. It is what I have sought across the world."