Great Throughts Treasury

"It took no more than three decades to transform a war crime into an act of compassion, thereby enabling the victors in the war against Nazism to adopt the very practices for which the Nazis had been solemnly condemned at Nuremberg."

"It was perfectly true -- a point that Will Straughan was liable to bring up at the Saturday evening gatherings -- that on the present form the new citizenry might be expected to have a marked preference for dog-racing over chamber music or readings from 'Paradise Lost,' but, my father would loftily point out, education would change all that. Education was, in fact, the lynchpin of the whole operation; the means whereby the Old Adam of the Saturday night booze-up, and fondness for Marie Lloyd in preference to Beatrice Webb, would be cast off, and the New Man be born as potential fodder for third Programmes yet to come."

"It was the Catholic Church's firm stand against contraception and abortion which finally made me decide to become a Catholic . . . As the Romans treated eating as an end in itself, making themselves sick in a vomitorium so as to enable them to return to the table and stuff themselves with more delicacies, so people now end up in a sort of sexual vomitorium. The Church's stand is absolutely correct. It is to its eternal honour that it opposed contraception, even if the opposition failed. I think, historically, people will say it was a very gallant effort to prevent a moral disaster."

"It is only possible to succeed at second-rate pursuits ? like becoming a millionaire or a prime minister, winning a war, seducing beautiful women, flying through the stratosphere or landing on the moon. First-rate pursuits involving, as they must, trying to understand what life is about and trying to convey that understanding ? inevitably result in a sense of failure. A Napoleon, a Churchill, a Roosevelt can feel themselves to be successful, but never a Socrates, a Pascal, a Blake. Understanding is forever unattainable. Therein lies the inevitability of failure in embarking upon its quest, which is none the less the only one worthy of serious attention."

"It was through brooding on the strange phenomena of our time that I came to see that in the liberal-minded self-intimations of a death wish, and to realize that its dominance in the Western world ? especially since the emergence of the United States as the preponderant influence, and the development of the all-powerful media for whose fraudulent processes and procedures the liberal mind has a singular aptitude ? was responsible for the Gadarene bias apparent in all of our policies and projects. In other words, there we were confronted not with a whole series of crises and problems, but with one crisis, amounting to a death wish ? an urge to self-destruction ? seeping into every aspect of our way of life, especially our values, our beliefs, our aspirations, how we see the past and our hopes for the future, the qualities we cherish, and those we hold up to obloquy. A touch of irony is added by virtue of the fact that this Gadarene course is associated with ostensibly optimistic views -- with the notion of a perfect society or Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, attained by human effort; in Marxist terms, by the final triumph of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie ? whereupon the State may be expected to whither away and mankind to live happily ever after."

"It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh."

"It was while I was in the Holy Land for the purpose of making three B.B.C. television programmes on the New Testament that a curious, almost magical, certainty seized me about Jesus' birth, ministry and Crucifixion . . . I became aware that there really had been a man, Jesus, who was also God - I was conscious of his presence. He really had spoken those sublime words - I heard them. He really had died on a cross and risen from the dead. Otherwise, how was it possible for me to meet him, as I did? . . . The words Jesus spoke are living words, as relevant today as when they were first spoken; the light he shone continues to shine as brightly as ever. Thus he is alive, as for instance Socrates - who also chose to lay down his life for truth's sake - isn't . . . The Cross is where history and life, legend and reality, time and eternity, intersect. There, Jesus is nailed for ever to show us how God could become a man and a man become God."

"It would be difficult for anyone looking around the world today to resist the conclusion that something has gone very badly indeed with what we continue to call ?Western Civilization.? This awareness tends to be distorted and muffled ? if not obliterated ? by the media, which manage to induce us to take for granted the continuingly explosive situations that confront us on every hand, and to see as an enlargement of our freedom and an enhancement of the quality of our living the steady and ominous erosion of the moral standards on which our traditional way of life has been based."

"Like trying a man's finger for having pulled the trigger of a gun which murdered someone."

"Let us also turn in our imagination to Carthage, in the year 410. When St. Augustine received the news that Rome, the great Rome, has been sacked, and the barbarians have taken over, his first thought is to reassure his flock. ?If this catastrophe is indeed true,? he tells them, ?it must be God's will. Men build cities and men destroy cities, but the City of God they didn't build and cannot destroy. The Heavenly City,? he goes on, ?outshines Rome beyond comparison. There, instead of victory, is truth; instead of high rank, holiness; instead of peace, felicity; instead of life, eternity. There, take Aristotle, put him near to the Rock of Christ and he fades away into nothingness. Who is Aristotle? When he hears the words, 'Christ said,' then he shakes in Hell. 'Pythagoras said this.?; 'Plato said that.' Put them near the Rock and compare these arrogant people with Him who was crucified. Thus we come to see that in our fallen state, our imperfection, we can conceive perfection. Through the Incarnation, the presence of God among us in the lineaments of Man, we have a window in the walls of time, which looks out onto this Heavenly City.?"

"Liberal minds flocked to the USSR in an unending procession, from the great ones like Shaw and Gide and Barbusse and Julian Huxley and Harold Laski and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, down to poor little teachers, crazed clergymen and millionaires, driveling dons, all utterly convinced that, under the aegis of the great Stalin, a new dawn is breaking in the world, so that the human race may at last be united in liberty, equality and fraternity forevermore. . . These Liberal minds are prepared to believe anything, however preposterous, to overlook anything, however villainous, to approve anything, however obscurantist and brutally authoritarian, in order to be able to preserve intact the confident expectation that one of the most thoroughgoing, ruthless and bloody tyrannies ever to exist on earth can be relied on to champion human freedom, the brotherhood of man, and all the other good Liberal causes to which they had dedicated their lives . . . They are unquestionably one of the marvels of the age. . . all chanting the praises of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and of Stalin as its most gracious and beloved figurehead. It was as though a Salvation Army contingent had turned out with bands and banners in honor of some ferocious tribal deity, or as though a vegetarian society had issued a passionate plea for cannibalism."

"Marx and Kierkegaard, the two key voices of the twentieth century. The curious thing is that though Marx purported to have an infallible scientific key to history, almost all his prophecies have failed to happen. On the other hand, Kierkegaard's forecasts have been fulfilled to a remarkable degree. Take for instance his profound sense that if men lost the isolation, the separateness, which awareness of the presence of God alone can give, they would soon find themselves irretrievably part of a collectivity with only mass communications to shape their hopes, formulate their values and arrange their thinking . . ."

"Never forget, a Stranger said to me once in the lobby of the Midland Hotel in Manchester, that only dead fish swim with the stream."

"Marx and Freud are the two great destroyers of Christian civilization, the first replacing the gospel of love by the gospel of hate, the other undermining the essential concept of human responsibility."

"My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it."

"One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything."

"Only dead fish swim with the stream."

"On television I feel like a man playing piano in a brothel; every now and again he solaces himself by playing 'Abide with Me' in the hope of edifying both the clients and the inmates"

"One of the stupidest theories of Western life."

"Pascal was the first and perhaps is still the most effective voice to be raised in warning of the consequences of the enthronement of the human ego in contradistinction to the cross, symbolizing the ego's immolation. How beautiful it all seemed at the time of the Enlightenment, that man triumphant would bring to pass that earthly paradise whose groves of academe would ensure the realization forever of peace, plenty, and beatitude in practice. But what a nightmare of wars, famines, and folly was to result therefrom."

"People think of faith as being something that you don't really believe, a device in helping you believe simply it. Of course that is quite wrong. As Pascal says, faith is a gift of God. It is different from the proof of it. It is the kind of faith God himself places in the heart, of which the proof is often the instrument."

"Perhaps I should have been one [some sort of a professional religious]; I like to think a monk notable for his austerities, the voice of one crying in the wilderness; but more probably a tiresome Unitarian in Walsall who writes incessantly to the local paper."

"Our twentieth century, far from being notable for scientific skepticism, is one of the most credulous eras in all history. It is not that people believe in nothing ? which would be bad enough ? but that they believe in anything ? which is really terrible. Recoiling, as they do, from accepting the validity of miracles, and priding themselves on seeing the Incarnation as a transcendental con-trick, they will accept at its face value any proposition, however nonsensical, that is presented in scientific or sociological jargon."

"Regarding the reversal of moral standards, so that, as the horrid sisters chant in Macbeth, ?Fair is foul and foul is fair,? there are some apt words by Simone Weil . I don't know whether you are familiar with her: a French Jewess who is also a lady of great mystical insight, who actually died in this country in the recent War. Simone Weil, whose luminous intelligence and insights are among the most penetrating of our time and bear very clearly on this not just confusion between the concepts of good and evil, but the actual replacement of one by the other. ?Nothing is so beautiful,? she writes, ?nothing is so continually fresh and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good; no desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil. But with fantasy, it is the other way around. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied, intriguing, attractive, and full of charm.?"

"Searching about in their minds for some explanation of this pursuit of happiness that became a death wish, the archaeologists, it seems to me, would be bound to hit upon the doctrine of ?Progress?: probably the most deleterious fancy to ever take possession of the human heart. The liberal mind's basic dogma ? the notion that human beings as individuals must necessarily get better and better ? is even now considered by most people to be untenable in the light of their indubitably outrageous behavior towards one another. But the equivalent collective concept ? that their social circumstances and conduct must necessarily improve ? has come to seem almost axiomatic. On this basis, all change represents Progress, and is therefore good. To change anything is per se to improve or reform it. The archaeologists will also note how, with the abandonment of Christianity, the whole edifice of ethics, law, culture, and human relationships based upon it was likewise demolished; how sex and associated erotica and sterility rites provided the mysticism of the new religion of Progress; and education ? a moral equivalent of conversion, whereby the old Adam of ignorance, superstition, and the blind acceptance of tradition was put aside, and the new Liberal Man born: enlightened, erudite, cultivated. So the bustling campuses multiplied and expanded, as did the facilities and buildings: more and more professors instructing more and more students in more and more subjects. As the astronauts soared into the vast eternity of space, on earth the garbage piled higher. As the groves of academe extended their domain, their alumni's arms reached lower. As the phallic cult spread, so did impotence. In great wealth, great poverty. In health, sickness. In numbers, deception. Gorging, left hungry. Sedated, left restless. Telling all, hiding all. In flesh united, but forever separate. So we pressed on, through the valley of abundance, that leads to the wasteland of satiety. Passing through the gardens of fantasy, seeking happiness ever more ardently, and finding boundless despair ever more surely."

"Thanks to the great mercy and marvel of the Incarnation, the cosmic scene is resolved into a human drama. God reaches down to become a Man and Man reaches up to relate himself to God. Time looks into eternity and eternity into time, making now always, and always now. Everything is transformed by the sublime dream of the Incarnation ? God's special parable for fallen man and a fallen world. The way opens before us that was charted in the birth, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The way that successive generations of believers have striven to follow, deriving themselves the moral, spiritual, and intellectual creativity out of which have come everything truly great in our art, our literature, our music, the splendor of the great Cathedrals, and the illumination of the saints and mystics, as well as countless lives of men and women serving their God and loving their Savior in humility and Faith. It's a glorious record ? not just of the past, but continuing now. The books are open, not closed."

"Sees the necessity for man to have spiritual values and it shows him how to get at those through physical sacraments."

"Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society."

"Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century"

"So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he heeled over ? a weary, battered old brontosaurus ? and became extinct."

"St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel."

"Suddenly, without thinking or deciding, I started swimming back to shore . . . I shouted foolishly for help, and kept my eyes fixed on the lights of Peter's Cafe and the Costa da Sol. They were the lights of the world; they were the lights of my home, my habitat, where I belonged. I must reach them. There followed an overwhelming joy such as I had never experienced before; an ecstasy. In some mysterious way it became clear to me that there was no darkness, only the possibility of losing sight of a light which shone eternally; . . . that our sufferings, our affliction, are part of a drama - an essential, even an ecstatic part - endlessly revolving around the two great propositions of good and evil, of light and darkness. A brief interlude, an incarnation, reaching back into the beginning of time, and forward into an ultimate fulfillment in the universal spirit of love which informs, animates, illuminates all creation, from the tiniest particle of insentient matter to the radiance of God's very throne . . . Though I scarcely realized it at the time and subsequently only very slowly and dimly, this episode represented for me one of those deep changes which take place in our lives; as, for instance, in adolescence, only more drastic and fundamental. A kind of spiritual adolescence, whereby, thenceforth, all my values and pursuits and hopes were going to undergo a total transformation - from the carnal towards the spiritual; from the immediate, the now, towards the everlasting, the eternal. In a tiny dark dungeon of the ego, chained and manacled, I had glimpsed a glimmer of light . . ."

"Television was not invented to make human beings vacuous, but is an emanation of their vacuity."

"Surely the glory of journalism is its transience."

"Television, I should say ? in the light of what I know about it; my memories of working with it ? is the ultimate in fantasy: a sort of Caliban's Island; full of sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not, so that when we wake, if we ever do, we cry to sleep again. And it is precisely the transposition of good and evil in this world of fantasy that, in my opinion, lies at the root of our present malaise. Such was also Solzhenitsyn's first impression when he arrived in the West. ?Our troubles,? he said, ?were due precisely to our loss of any awareness of good and evil.? It is good and evil after all that provides the theme of the drama of our mortal existence. In this sense, you might capture them with the positive and negative points that generate an electric current; transpose the points, and the current fails, the lights go out, darkness falls, and all is confusion."

"The greatest artists, saints, philosophers and, until quite recent times, scientists, through the Christian centuries. . . have all assumed that the New Testament promise of eternal life is valid, and that the great drama of the Incarnation which embodies it, is indeed the master-drama of our existence. To suppose that these distinguished believers were all credulous fools whose folly and credulity in holding such beliefs has now been finally exposed, would seem to me untenable; and anyway I'd rather be wrong with Dante and Shakespeare and Milton, with Augustine of Hippo and Francis of Assisi, with Dr Johnson, Blake and Dostoevsky than right with Voltaire, Rousseau, the Huxleys, Herbert Spencer, H.G. Wells and Bernard Shaw."

"The only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realize, is to feel ourselves to be at home here on earth."

"The eminent so often say and do things which are infinitely more ridiculous than anything you can invent for them. That might not sound to you like a terrible difficulty but it is, believe me, the main headache of the editor of an ostensibly humorous paper. You go to great trouble to invent a ridiculous Archbishop of Canterbury and give him ridiculous lines to say and then suddenly he rises in his seat at the theatre [at a performance of Godspell] and shouts out: "Long live God" . . . which, as I reflected at the time, was like shouting, "carry on eternity" or "keep going infinity" . . . And you're defeated, you're broken."

"The Incarnation was not a mere historical event like the Battle of Waterloo, or the American Declaration of Independence ? something that's happened, and then was over. It goes on happening all the time. God did not retreat back into Heaven when the fateful words ?It is finished? were uttered on Golgotha. The Word that became flesh has continued and continues to dwell among us, full of grace and truth. There are examples on every hand; we have but to look for them. For instance, the man in Solzhenitsyn's labor camp who scribbled sentences from the Gospels that he pulled out of his pocket in the evening to keep himself serene and brotherly in that terrible place. Then, Solzhenitsyn himself ? a product of this world's first overtly atheistic materialist society who yet can tell us in shining words that ?it was only when I lay there, on rotting prison straw, that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either; but right through every human heart and through all human hearts. So, bless you, prison for having been in my life.? What insight, what wisdom, acquired in a Soviet prison, after a Marxist upbringing!"

"The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact."

"The fact is, there is built into life a strong ironical theme for which we should be duly grateful to our Creator, since it helps us to find our way through the fantasy which dulls us to the reality of our existence ? what Blake called a ?fearful symmetry.? God has mercifully made diversions whereby we seek to evade this reality: I mean the pursuit of power, of sensual delight, of money, of learning, of celebrity, of happiness ? so manifestly preposterous that we are forced to turn to Him for help and for mercy. We seek wealth, and find we've accumulated only worthless pieces of paper. We seek security, and find we have the means in our hands to blow ourselves and our little Earth to smithereens. Looking for carnal satisfaction, we find ourselves involved in sterility rites. As looking for freedom, we infallibly fall into the servitude of self-gratification."

"The pack [i.e., the media and the "intelligentsia"] is after him and because what he says is unbearable: that the answer to dictatorship is not liberalism, but Christianity. I mean, that is an unbearable proposition from their point of view, and it is where he stands . . . It has been something wonderful to watch and, to more people than you might think, enormously heartening: that that is what this man should have to say instead of a lot of claptrap . . . They started off by never mentioning that he was a Christian. I mean, for a long time, he was made a hero of the cause for freedom, but it was never mentioned that an integral and essential part of it was his Christian belief."

"The origins of the Holocaust lay, not in Nazi terrorism and anti-Semitism, but in pre-Nazi Weimar Germany's acceptance of euthanasia and mercy-killing as humane and estimable."

"The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment. I asked for bread and was given a tranquilizer. It is important to recognize that in our time man has not written one word, thought one thought, put two notes or two bricks together, splashed color on to canvas or concrete into space, in a manner which will be of any conceivable imaginative interest to posterity."

"The most terrible thing about materialism, even more terrible than its proneness to violence, is its boredom, from which sex, alcohol, drugs, all devices for putting out the accusing light of reason and suppressing the unrealizable aspirations of love, offer a prospect of deliverance."

"The Pope is a brave man and a tough man . . . he is an admirable choice as Pope precisely because he has been a cardinal in a communist country and therefore knows at firsthand what it means to be at the mercy of an atheistic, tyrannical regime . . . His experience makes him - when faced by hostile movements or undermining tactics such as "liberation theology" in Latin America - the best champion to strengthen the authority of Pope and Church. And that strengthening is sorely needed in an irreligious, materialistic world, even at the cost of a certain conservatism."

"There is a gulf between reality? and the world of fantasy that the media project.... Western people are being enormously misled by being induced to regard things on the screen as real, when actually they are fantasy. But, of course, God can use all things ? even television, even you and me."

"The trouble with kingdoms of heaven on earth is that they're liable to come to pass, and then their fraudulence is apparent for all to see. We need a kingdom of heaven in Heaven, if only because it can't be realized."

"The truth is that a lost empire, lost power and lost wealth provide perfect circumstances for living happily and contentedly in our enchanted island."

"The pursuit of happiness, which American citizens are obliged to undertake, tends to involve them in trying to perpetuate the moods, tastes and aptitudes of youth."