What Do You Think?

Can anyone know for sure that his or her religion is right?  Why or why not?

(Share your answers in the comments below.)

Benjamin Disraeli - Select Quotes

Every woman should marry, and no man.
~ in Lothair

The secret of success is constancy to purpose.

Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.

When men are pure, laws are useless; when men are corrupt, laws are broken.

Never complain and never explain.

There are three kinds of lies; lies, damned lies, and statistics.

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Augustine - Select Quotes

He that is good is free, though he is a slave; he that is evil is a slave, though, he be a king.

Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore seek not to understand that thou mayest believe, but believe that thou mayest understand.

Total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.

When facts are reported, they deny the value of evidence; when the evidence is produced, they declare it inconclusive.
~ in The City of God

Thou has made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee.
~ in Confessions

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Henry Ward Beecher - Select Quotes

The worst thing in the world next to anarchy, is government.
~ in Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1867

Ignorance is the womb of monsters.
~ in Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1867

The strength and the happiness of a man consists in finding out the way in which God is going and going in that way, too.

Troubles are the tools by which God fashions us for better things.

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Ignorance - Select Quotes

Ignorance is the womb of monsters.
~ Henry Ward Beecher, in Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1867

When I am asked a question
Here is the way things go:
I give a lengthy answer
Before saying, “I don’t know.”
~ Joshua Adams

Apathy and ignorance are the worst forms of bondage for man; they are the invisible walls of confinement that we carry round us when we are in their grip.
~ Rabindranath Tagore, in “A Poet’s School” in Rabindranath Tagore: Pioneer in Education, Essays and Exchanges between Rabindranath Tagore and L.k. Elmhirst (London: John Murray, 1961), p. 64

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Freedom of Speech - Select Quotes

Better a thousandfold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race.
~ Charles Bradlaugh, in Speeches

If we do not believe in freedom of speech for those we despise we do not believe in it at all.
~ Noam Chomsky

The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.
~ Hubert Humphrey

The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions.
~ Adlai Stevenson, speech, New York City, 28 August 1952

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Marriage - Select Quotes

One man has never married, and that’s his hell; another is, and that’s his plague.
~ Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy

Every woman should marry, and no man.
~ Benjamin Disraeli, in Lothair

Vitium uxoris aut tollendum aut ferendum est. Qui tollit vitium, uxorem commodiorem praestat; qui fert, sese meliorem facit. [A wife’s faults must either be corrected or put up with. Who corrects the faults, makes his wife more pleasant; who puts up with them, makes himself a better man.]
~ Lucius Afranius, in Satirae Menippeae, De Officio mariti

The institution of marriage makes a parasite of woman, an absolute dependent. It incapacitates her for life’s struggle, annihilates her social consciousness, paralyzes her imagination, and then imposes its gracious protection, which is in reality a snare, a travesty on human character.
~ Emma Goldman

Once a man’s married he’s absolutely bitched.
~ Ernest Hemingway, in The Three-Day Blow

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Art - Select Quotes

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
~ Scott Adams

A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.
~ Theodore Adorno

It is curious that money, which is the most valuable thing in life, excepis excipiendis, should be the most fatal corrupter of music, literature, painting and all the arts. As soon as any art is pursued with a view of money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, all hope of genuine good work.
~ Samuel Butler

Nature is the Art of God.
~ Dante Alighieri in Monarchy

Art is a quest for the useless.
~ Gustave Flaubert

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.
~ Rollo May

Art is not pleasure, or an amusement; art is a great matter.
~ Leo Tolstoy, in What Is Art?

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Russell Kirk - Select Quotes

The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called “the permanent things” – the norms of human action.
~ In Enemies of the Permanent Things (La Salle, IL: Sherwood Sugden and Co., 1984), page 41.

Without that Resurrection, which prefigures our own resurrection and life everlasting, one might as well turn again to the gods of the Greeks, or to Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca. The Resurrection is critical both to my personal faith and to the whole elaborate edifice called Christianity. It is now more rationally possible to believe in the Resurrection than it was in Saint Paul’s time.
~ Quoted in Nearer, My God by William F. Buckley, Jr. (NY: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1997), page 124.

Every right is married to a duty; every freedom owes a corresponding responsibility; and there cannot be genuine freedom unless there exists also genuine order, in the moral realm and in the social realm.
~ Russell Kirk, in Redeeming the Time (Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996), page 33

The Naked Ape-theory of human nature, the “reductionist” notion of man as a breathing automaton, is reinforced by ignorance of literature’s moral imagination.
~ in in Redeeming the Time (Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996), page 81

All things begin and end in mystery.
~ in in Redeeming the Time (Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996), page 83

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Sapientia vs. Scientia - Select Quotes

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