Jean le Malchanceux

You may look for motive in an act, but only after the act has been committed. An effect creates not only the search for a cause, but the reality of the cause itself. I must warn you, however, that the attempt to establish relationships between acts and motives, effects and causes, is one of the most time-wasting games ever invented by Man. Do you know why you kicked the cat this morning? Or gave a sou to that beggar? Or set forth for Jerusalem rather than Gomorrah?

Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Irony of American History"

Our idealists are divided between those who would renounce the responsibilities of power for the sake of preserving the purity of our soul and those who are ready to cover every ambiguity of good and evil in our actions by the frantic insistence that any measure taken in a good cause must be unequivocally virtuous. We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought [not] to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise. ... Communism is a vivid object lesson in the monstrous consequences of moral complacency about the relation of dubious means to supposedly good ends.

Tom Robbins, "Another Roadside Attraction"

Science is an active response to the world. Mysticism accepts the world. Mystics scurry about trying to get in harmony with nature. Scientists turn nature to issues which we define. Science is resistance, rather than acceptance, ...

Thomas Wolfe, "You Can't Go Home Again"

There came to him an image of man's whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man's life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man's grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of allengulfing night.

Isabel Molina Vargas

No hay que tener vergüenza de hablar lo que Dios no tuvo vergüenza de criar.

(We should not be embarrassed to talk about what God was not embarrassed to create.)

Saint Augustine

As long as we aim at a good we are always on the way.

Ken Kesey, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"

I've seen a thousand of 'em, old and young, men and women. Seen 'em all over the country and in the homes - people who try to make you weak so they can get you to toe the line, to follow their rules, to live like they want you to. And the best way to do this, to get you to knuckle under, is to weaken you by gettin' you where it hurts the worst.