Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.
Ben Hecht

Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
G. K. Chesterton

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.
Aleister Crowley

Knowledge and virtue are impossible without transcendence. MR

Richard Weaver; Ideas Have Consequences 1948

Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil. Hope or restoration depends upon recovery of the “ceremony of innocence”, of that clearness of vision and knowledge of form which enables us to sense what is alien or destructive, what does not comport with our moral ambition. The time to seek this is now, before we have acquired the perfect insouciance of those who prefer perdition. For, as the course goes on, the movement turns centrifugal; we rejoice in our abandon and are never so full of the sense of accomplishment as when we have struck some bulwark of our culture a deadly blow.

Diogenes of Sinope

"I've seen Plato's cups and table, but not his cupness and tableness."

"Evangelism and theology for the most part go separate ways, and the result is great loss for both. When theology is not held on course by the demands of evangelistic communication, it grows abstract and speculative, wayward in method, theoretical in interest and irresponsible in stance. When evangelism is not fertilized, fed and controlled by theology, it becomes a stylized performance seeking its effect through manipulative skills rather than the power of vision and the force of truth. Both theology and evangelism are then, in one important sense, unreal, false to their own God-given nature; for all true theology has an evangelistic thrust, and all true evangelism is theology in action."
J.I. Packer

"Evangelism that does not lead to purity of life and purity of doctrine is just as faulty and incomplete as an orthodoxy which does not lead to a concern for, and communication with, the lost."
Francis Schaeffer

Every once in a while in my discussions someone asks how I can believe in the Trinity. My answer is always the same. I would still be an agnostic if there was no Trinity, because there would be no answers. Without the high order of personal unity and diversity as given in the Trinity, there are no answers. (Francis A. Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, Ch. 1) God did not need to create; God does not need the universe as the universe needs Him. Why? Because we have a full and true Trinity. The Persons of the Trinity communicated with each other and loved each other before the creation of the world. This is not only an answer to the acute philosophic need of unity in diversity, but of personal unity and diversity. The unity and diversity cannot exist before God or be behind God, because whatever is farthest back is God. But with the doctrine of the Trinity, the unity and diversity is God Himself -- three Persons, yet one God. That is what the Trinity is, and nothing less than this. (Francis A. Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, Ch. 1) Nobody else, no philosophy, has ever given us an answer for unity and diversity. So when people ask whether we are embarrassed intellectually by the Trinity, I always switch it over into their own terminology -- unity and diversity. Every philosophy has this problem, and no philosophy has an answer. Christianity does have an answer in the existence of the Trinity. The only answer to what exists is that He, the triune God, is there. (Francis A. Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, Ch. 1)

Seneca

“As the soil, however rich it may be, cannot be productive without cultivation, so the mind without culture can never produce good fruit.

Cultural norms are absorbed through the pores of our skin; they find there way into the cerebral regions and burn synaptic ruts that cause un-analyzed thoughts to form in our consciousness. These lazy thoughts are scattered throughout our minds in numerous heaps that may smell like dung (or is it the smell of decay), but one becomes accustomed to the odor or at least becomes distracted from it by the incessant necessity of consumption and amusement; a necessity that has been created from our cultural norms.

It is the rare individual that attempts to sort through the piles as it is difficult and unfamiliar work, and it may lead to rational and creative thought that may be viewed as insane. MR