words of wisdom
"He became what we are, so that he might make us what he is."
Athanasius of Alexandria, Against Heresies
"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win".
Gandhi
"Hell has three gates: lust, anger and greed.”
Vyasa, Mahābhārata महाभारतम्
"The most important moment in my life is the present instant.
The most important being is the one in front of me at that moment.
And the most important act is always love."
Master Eckart
"So the greatest of all virtues is love. It is here that we find the true meaning of the Christian faith. This is at bottom the meaning of the cross. The great event on Calvary signifies more than a meaningless drama that took place on the stage of history. It is a telescope through which we look out into the long vista of eternity and see the love of God breaking forth into time.
It is an eternal reminder to a power drunk generation that love is most durable power in the world, and that it is at bottom the heartbeat of the moral cosmos."
Martin Luther King, St. Paul’s Letter to the American Churches, November 4, 1956
“Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil, but as a necessity, or even a duty. Sin is not a distance, it is a turning of our gaze in the wrong direction. Human beings are so made that the ones who do the crushing feel nothing; it is the person crushed who feels what is happening. Unless one has placed oneself on the side of the oppressed, to feel with them, one cannot understand. Power is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the latter it crushes, the former it intoxicates. The truth is, no one really possesses it."
Simone Weil, War and the Iliad, 1939
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 1809
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself.
For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero, Orationum
“Wealth is not without its advantages... [but] wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding."
John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 1958
"Let the children have their night of fun and laughter. Let the gifts of Father Christmas delight their play. Let us grown-ups share to the full in their unstinted pleasures before we turn again to the stern task and the formidable years that lie before us, resolved that, by our sacrifice and daring, these same children shall not be robbed of their inheritance or denied their right to live in a free and decent world. And so, in God’s mercy, a happy Christmas to you all."
Winston Churchill, Christmas radio address, December 1941