Catholics From The United States

"Need I say that, if the universe is destroyed, it is unlikely that the British Isles will be preserved?"

"War is murder, king-sized."

"Come on, Amelia. We are not really British. We do not have to look down our noses at honest labor."

"Were I a real master of intrigue, I would not have the reputation for being a master of intrigue."

"I had sudden insight into male psychology. My theory: Guys are idiots. Keep this theory in mind. It explains the phenomena while assuming no unnecessary agents."

"Those who work are free. There are only three categories of nonproductive people: babies, beggars, robbers."

"You have reached that unfortunate age where you have all of life’s answers and you know everything more perfectly and more profoundly than your elders."

"I resolved, as I walked, to be the most dangerous one I could be. And in my mind, that meant one thing: thought. Think things through; then act. First be patient; then be brave."

"So that was my task as leader. Escape from a situation that was complex, dangerous, and littered with unknowns. Get out of the burning labyrinth without stepping on the buried land mines."

"“What can you do?” “I can bring you in dream to one who dreams of you.” “Will that help me?” “No. But you will come, because you will hope that it will.”"

"Miss Daw said, half to herself, “Now you have had your first lesson in what it is like to be a real grown-up woman in a man’s world, my dear. We are judged by our looks, and men are not.”"

"Yes, I prayed. Why not? The advantage of being an agnostic over being an atheist is that I always had the possibility of being wrong, and could still entertain the hope that the universe was better organized than it appeared to be."

"The Maiden had been abducted by the Unseen One, and raped. When the crime of the Unseen One finally came to light, instead of punishing his brother, Lord Terminus (who feared him) gave him the Maiden as his wife. We have never forgiven Lord Terminus his crime, this cynical and smirking act of corruption. What kind of punishment is it to a rapist, to have the victim of his outrages be given to him in bounds of matrimony, his victim to be his, forever after? Lord Terminus decreed that when a husband takes a wife by violence, it is not rape, but holy matrimony; honor is satisfied once the wedding is performed. Honor was satisfied, but we were not satisfied."

"Comedy is easy. Intrigue is hard."

"You all think I am a coward, when all I am is polite."

"“Broken oaths are bad luck eggs.” That was so weird, I did not know what to say. So I said, “Eggs?” “They hatch bad luck.”"

"Everyone loses in war, even the winners."

"It seemed even the smallest exercise of arbitrary authority could go to one’s head like wine. I told myself to remember this when I was older."

"I cannot describe myself except to say that I am either very vain or very beautiful, and that I hope I am the latter, while suspecting I may be the former."

"“They (i. e., the Olympian gods) operate on moral principles. You have to break a promise to them, or break a rule, for them to get power over you.” Victor commented darkly, “That explains why religions have rules no one can follow. If everyone is a sinner, by definition, everyone is under their power.”"

"I will grant you three wishes, but do not ask for immortality without asking for eternal youth."

"This thought had led to the fear that I might pick the wrong God to pray to. I thought that, because praying to the wrong God was expressly a sin, and because a merciful God might forgive me for forgetting to pray, it therefore followed that, even without knowing which one was the right one, my best chances lay in staying quiet and hoping for the best. That strategy worked in class when I didn’t know the answer, so I supposed it might work in the arena of theology, also."

"If you only write one book in your whole life, and only sell 600 copies or less, nonetheless, I assure you, I solemnly assure you, that this book will be someone’s absolutely favorite book of all time, and it will come to him on some dark day and give him sunlight, and open his eyes and fill his heart and make him see things in life even you never suspected, and will be his most precious tale, and it will live in his heart like the Book of Gold. [...] I write for that one reader I will never see, the one who needs just such a tale as I can pen, in just such a time and place, some rainy afternoon or dark hour, when providence will bring my book into his hands. And he will open it, and it will not be a book, but a casement, from which he will glimpse the needed vision his soul requires of a world larger than our own, or a star in a heaven wider and higher than ours, a star aflame with magic more majestic than any star mortal astronomers can name."

"Unliving things have no passions, and no memory: mere matter is the amnesia of the universe."

"When I was young, I thought the act of getting older meant, year by year, getting more sophisticated, more hard, cool, and unpitying. Less innocent. Maybe that was a childish idea of what getting older was about. Maybe adults, mature adults, get more innocent with time, not less. Because the word “innocent” does not mean “naïve,” it means “not guilty.” Children do small evils to each other, schoolyard fights and insults, not because their hearts are pure, but because their powers are small. Grownups have more power. Some of them do great evils with that power. But what about the ones who don’t? Aren’t they more innocent than children, not less?"

"There was no point in debating the advantages of reality over unreality. There was no reasoning with someone to whom truth was a matter of taste."

"Everything is inanimate, if by that you mean things that operate according to cause and effect. Free will is an epiphenomenon, a misjudgment impressed upon us and sustained by the actions of brain molecules in motion."

"When I reflect on the natural world and its glorious messages for us, I remember our responsibility to restore and preserve it, to work toward a sustainable future in which the human community lives in harmony with nature. We have a sacred duty to the earth itself, to one another, and to all the other species that inhabit our planet, to live in a state of friendship with the natural world, enhancing its life by simplifying our needs and desires."

"It is quite ordinary for spiritual friends to be able, naturally, spontaneously, and almost effortlessly, to discern the presence of the Divine in each other. When we are really awake, we cannot miss the presence of Divine Reality; it is always calling us."

"When I first lived in a monastery, I learned very quickly that monastic life did not afford more escape from the world than any other place. Rather, it presented a deeper encounter with it. The monastic life is not a rejection of the world; it is a decision to engage with this world from a different dimension, from the enlarged perspective of love, as perceived by the Gospel in its utter simplicity and clarity."

"We've got to realize that we're in a ball game at a certain juncture, at this point, where we better go back to bipartisanship in looking at foreign policy, be we conservatives or liberals, or Democrats or Republicans, that this country is beginning to lose its footing in the world, not only as a leader, but as a friend, or as a credible enemy. We are being perceived, perhaps somewhat accurately, as a rather paralyzed giant that is ripe to fall off the tree like an over-ripe plum, and fulfill Khrushchev's prophecy, "We will bury you!" He didn't mean overcome us with nuclear weapons. He meant that we, in our sloppy thinking and presumption about not being able to live with prosperity, and not being able to look things in the eye, would simply weaken until our interests were eroded to the point, and our credibility was eroded to the point, that we couldn't stand."

"We have been in a process of attaining a great degree of luxury, degrees of luxury which distract us... and we are consumed with such matters as wrap-around octophonic sound in our automobiles and so forth, we are becoming quite sophisticated with respect to non-necessities. This has happened to nations in the past, and it is my belief that man can cope with adversity, and that his most difficult problem, is coping with prosperity."

"I was once in a rig which was inducing considerable pain, and I finally just said... God, you've got it. I can't take it any more. I can't handle it. I'm just putting it entirely in your hands, and from the instant I phrased that... I felt absolutely no pain. In fact, I felt the greatest sense of comfort, not only physical comfort, but psychological warmth and comfort that I have ever felt in my life, before or since."

""TORTURE" −/ −−−/ ·−·/ −/ ··−/ ·−·/ ·/"

"We are honored to have had the opportunity to serve our country under difficult circumstances. We are profoundly grateful to our Commander-in-Chief and to our nation for this day. God bless America."

"We’re at an historic, but fragile, moment. The pro-life voters who were critical to Trump’s victory cannot now sit back. Now is the time to get more engaged than ever before. The abortion lobby is already bouncing back from their electoral defeat and preparing to fight because this is a do-or-die moment for them. Are we treating it the same way? We will need pro-life Americans to stand up and speak out louder than they ever have, call their members of Congress, pray, donate and demand that the pro-life agenda is carried out."

"We’re at a moment of historic opportunity, especially when it comes to taking down America’s largest abortion provider. For a century, Planned Parenthood has relentlessly marched forward with its message of eugenics and abortion, taking the lives of millions of unborn children and denying women the truth. They have intimidated political leaders and destroyed the careers of good men and women in office. Now, for the first time since our tax dollars were turned over to them a half century ago, we have the chance to convert federal funding to alternatives that honor community values and respect human life. We must seize this opportunity."

"GOD BLESS STEVE KING!!!"

"What an asshole."

"I'd like to see an America that is just so homogeneous that we look a lot the same."

"Every American should take note of those candidates who stand with the economic interests of America’s citizens, and who stand with the Rule of Law, by rejecting Amnesty in all its forms. It is wrong when Democrats seek to demean the intrinsic value of American citizenship by importing the Third World to replace the millions of voters their redistributionist policies and racial grievance politics have driven away. It is also wrong when Republican leadership conveniently chooses to waive the application of the law to guarantee a supply of unskilled and low-cost workers for their corporate benefactors."

"We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies."

"Without the right to life, how would an individual’s rights become vested? How could any other rights be realized if one’s very life could be taken away by another who is exercising their right to liberty or pursuit of happiness? Jefferson articulated a prioritized set of rights; first the right to life, then the right to liberty, then the pursuit of happiness. Each right was carefully prioritized in sequential order because the right to life trumps all other rights. No one can take a human life in exercising their liberties and no one can take a life or take away the liberty of another in their pursuit of happiness. If the right to life can be taken by another, then no right of anyone is protected."

"It's not about Harriet Tubman, it's about keeping the picture on the $20. Y'know? Why would you want to change that? I am a conservative, I like to keep what we have. Here's what's really happening: This is liberal activism on the part of the president that's trying to identify people by categories, and he's divided us on the lines of groups. ... This is a divisive proposal on the part of the president, and mine's unifying. It says just don't change anything."

"King: This ‘old, white people’ business does get a little tired, Charlie [Pierce]. I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about. Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization? Chris Hayes: Than white people? King: Than Western civilization itself. It’s rooted in western Europe, eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That’s all of Western civilization."

"White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization – how did that language become offensive?"

"But you know, you know that statistically the greatest danger to a black man in America is another black man."

"Some of them are valedictorians — and their parents brought them in. It wasn't their fault. It's true in some cases, but they aren't all valedictorians. They weren't all brought in by their parents. For everyone who's a valedictorian, there's another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds — and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert."

"[Global warming] is not proven, it's not science. It's more of a religion than a science...Everything that might result from a warmer planet is always bad in [environmentalists'] analysis...There will be more photosynthesis going on if the Earth gets warmer...And if sea levels go up 4 or 6 inches, I don't know if we'd know that...We don't know where sea level is even, let alone be able to say that it's going to come up an inch globally because some polar ice caps might melt because there's CO2 suspended in the atmosphere."

"I had a strong, Christian lawyer tell me yesterday that, under this decision that he has read, what it brings about is: It only requires one human being in this relationship -- that you could marry your lawnmower with this decision. I think he's right."