Atheistic Style
April 17, 2007
“The mark of the atheistic style is that it instinctively chooses the word which suggests that things are dead things; that things have no souls. Thus they will not speak of waging war, which means willing it; they speak of the “outbreak of war,” as if all the guns blew up without the men touching them. Instead of saying that employers pay less wages, which might pin the employers to some moral responsibility, they insist on talking about the “rise and fall” of wages. They will not speak of reform, but of development. The atheist style in letters always avoids talking of love or lust, which are things alive, and calls marriage or concubinage “the relations of the sexes”; as if a man and a woman were two wooden objects standing in a certain angle and attitude to each other, like a table and a chair.”
G. K. Chesterton – “The Flying Authority” Eugenics and Other Evils
Groaning of Creation
March 14, 2007
“There I lay staring upward, while the stars wheeled over… Faint to my ears came the gathered rumour of all lands: the springing and the dying, the song and the weeping, and the slow everlasting groan of overburdened stone.”
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892 – 1973)
Head in the Sand
February 19, 2007
“The wide world is all about you; you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord Of The Ring
victory?
February 18, 2007
“hope is not victory”
J. R. R. Tolkien
Grave Miscalculation
February 17, 2007
“It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
. . . to breed a war
February 15, 2007
“It needs but one foe to breed a war, and those who have not swords can still die upon them.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord Of The Ring
What’s worth defending?
January 10, 2007
“I do not love the bright sword for it’s sharpness, nor the arrow for it’s swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
. . . wars are always lost . . .
December 28, 2006
“The War is not over (and the one that is, or the part of it, has been largely lost). But it is of course wrong to fall into such a mood, for Wars are always lost, and War always goes on; and it is no good growing faint.”
J. R. R. Tolkien ~On the end of WWII
