What I want to fix your attention on is the vast overall movement towards the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every kind of human excellence -- moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not pretty to notice how 'democracy' (in the incantatory sense) is now doing for us the work that was once done by the most ancient dictatorships, and by the same methods The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic.' Children who are fit to proceed may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval's attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT. We may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when 'I'm as good as you' has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented who are they to overtop their fellows And anyway, the teachers -- or should I say nurses -- will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men.
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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who didn't know what fear was, we ought always to add the flea--and put him at the head of the procession.
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Everyone has a right to a university degree in America, even if it's in Hamburger Technology.
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It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.
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A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
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All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.
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Of all tyrannies a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
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Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
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Just a hurried line...to tell a story which puts the contrast between *our* feast of the Nativity and all this ghastly Xmas racket at it's lowest. My brother heard a woman on a 'bus say, as the 'bus passed a church with a Crib outside it, Oh Lor' They bring religion into everything. Look- they're dragging it even into Christmas now
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Friendship is not necessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
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The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.
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A sense of humor is just common sense dancing.
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A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.
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The perfect church service would be the one we were almost unaware of our attention would have been on God. But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself and thinking about worship is a different thing than worshipping ... 'Tis mad idolatry that makes the service greater than the god.
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It is only when they go wrong that machines remind you how powerful they are.
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Only reason can convince us of those three fundamental truths without a recognition of which there can be no effective liberty that what we believe is not necessarily true that what we like is not necessarily good and that all questions are open.
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A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
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I've always thought that the most extraordinary special effect you could do is to buy a child at the moment of its birth, sit it on a little chair and say, 'You'll have three score years and ten,' and take a photograph every minute. 'And we'll watch you and photograph you for ten years after you die, then we'll run the film.' Wouldn't that be extraordinary? We'd watch this thing get bigger and bigger, and flower to become extraordinary and beautiful, then watch it crumble, decay, and rot.
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We may not be able to get certainty, but we can get probability, and half a loaf is better than no bread.
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Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries avoid all entanglements.
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To find a fault is easy to do better may be difficult.
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Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
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Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
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The safest road to hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
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I am not basically a conservationist. When the last great whale is slaughtered, as it surely will be, the whales' suffering will be over. This is not the whales' loss, but man's. I am not concerned about the wiping out of a species - this is man's folly - I have only one concern, the suffering which we deliberately inflict upon animals whilst they live.
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I was not born to be free. I was born to adore and to obey.
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My God, Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!
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If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth - only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
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Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.
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It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us.
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