“What makes human beings different from the animals is, they know they are incomplete. Human beings seek that part of them that is missing, in order to be complete.”
Karl Marx

“Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
Thomas Dalrymple

“For two years now we have been witnessing a global coup d’état, in which a financial and ideological elite has succeeded in seizing control of part of national governments, public and private institutions, the media, the judiciary, politicians and religious leaders. All of these, without distinction, have become enslaved to these new masters who ensure power, money and social affirmation to their accomplices. Fundamental rights, which up until yesterday were presented as inviolable, have been trampled underfoot in the name of an emergency: today a health emergency, tomorrow an ecological emergency, and after that an internet emergency. Supranational organizations, financed in large measure by the conspirators of this coup d’état, are interfering in the government of individual nations and in the lives, relationships, and health of billions of people. They are doing it for money, certainly, but even more so in order to centralize power so as to establish a planetary dictatorship. It is the Great Reset of the World Economic Forum, the Agenda 2030 of the United Nations. It is the plan of the New World Order, in which a Universal Republic enslaves everyone and a Religion of Humanity cancels Faith in Christ.”
Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano

“The perfect dictatorship would have the appearance of democracy, but would basically be a prison without walls in which the prisoners would not even dream of escaping. It would essentially be a system of slavery, where, through consumption and entertainment, the slaves would love their servitude.”
​Aldous Huxley

“The purpose of life is not to stay alive as long as possible. The purpose of life is to live it.”
​Dr. Matthew Strauss

“Sincerity is the most important thing to master in politics and once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” 
John Crosbie, former Fisheries Minister

“If you don’t remember wanting to own a Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife when you were about nine, then it’s quite possible that you are in fact, a girl.”
​Neil Oliver

“We present young people with the notion that there’s nothing more honourable than to become an activist. Really, I think there is almost no lower calling.”
Jordan Peterson

​“I want a state that protects citizens against force and fraud, keeps its ambitions modestly in line with its startlingly modest capacities and leaves the distribution of goodies to the guy in the red suit.”
​John Robson, National Post

“If you destabilize the identity of local individuals so that they’re confused and aimless, it’s a hell of a lot easier to hoover up all the power. You need slaves, to be a tyrant.”
Jordan Peterson

​“Justin Trudeau is so slick. If you’re not really paying attention it all kind of sounds right until you peel off that very thin veneer of tolerance and progressivism and you find the worst sort of angry authoritarianism.”
Dave Rubin

​“The Government of Canada chose use of force—that is state violence—over peaceful negotiations, and democratic engagement with the Canadian people. The sad irony is that the protest in Ottawa was fundamentally about government overreach. By invoking the Emergencies Act, the government stepped even further into their oppressive government, by quashing the most fundamental right that belongs to a Canadian democracy...”
Eva Chipiuk, convoy lawyer

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more or less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master? That’s all.”

“Let this Inquiry be the starting point for all Canadians, and that means all Canadians, including Government leaders, to hold the Executive Branch of Canada to account. If there ever was a time for a Prime Minister to step down, now is that time.”
Eva Chipiuk Lawyer for the Freedom Convoy

​“One last question Mr. Prime Minister, can you tell us exactly when did you and your government become so fearful of your own citizens?”
Eva Chipiuk Freedom Convoy Lawyer

“At the G-20 Bali summit, Klaus Schwab instructed heads of government about the future steps to be taken to establish a world government. A powerful private organization with enormous economic means exercises undue power over political leaders who have no popular mandate. Klaus Schwab said: “In the fourth industrial revolution the winners will take it all, so if you are a World Economic Forum first mover, you are the winners”. These statements have two implications: the first is that “the winners will take it all”, though it is not clear in what capacity and with whose permission. The second is that those who do not adapt to this“fourth industrial revolution” will lose everything, including their freedom. In short, Klaus Schwab is threatening the heads of government to carry out the program of the Great Reset in their nations. This goes far beyond the pandemic: it is a global coup d’état, against which it is essential that people rise up. The threat is imminent and serious, since the World Economic Forum is capable of carrying out its subversive project and those who govern nations have all become either enslaved or blackmailed by this international mafia.”
Carlo Maria Vigano

“Customs, craftsmanship, religion, tradition, all land marks that used to give Western society some kind of guidance and a sense of identity, have been under massive attack and some might say, are even being willfully destroyed. As a result we now live in a globalized world without any physical or moral borders, leaving most of us permanently confused, disoriented and isolated. That is exactly the fate that the globalist neoliberal elites have in mind for us, and it's not so difficult to guess why. Uprooted, lost people are easy to control. They want to turn us into docile consumers to buy what they offer and do what they say. We are dealing with an enemy that doesn't just want to brainwash us. We are dealing with an enemy that wants to get into our brains - an enemy who wants to play God.”
 Eva Vlaardingerbroek

“I think that if I did not work with wood, my life would be a hollow emptiness. If I did not form and shape and build, what would I have done to leave my mark on the world. My eyes have been filled with the endlessly changing patterns of the grains. I have felt the warmth of a thousand suns in my hands every day. I have smelled the rich, tangy odours of the freshly hewn chips. These are the things that have made my life so fine. 
These are the most precious things that I can leave for you, my son.”
Jonas Wainwright, master carpenter, from a letter to his son, 1832.

“Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There is too much fraternizing with the enemy.” — Henry Kissinger

​“Justin Trudeau, doesn’t, can’t and won’t. He won’t tolerate dissent, because Justin Trudeau cannot debate. He is not capable of taking an opinion that is contrary to what he’s been told to think or to articulate, from his staff. It’s a complete perversion and it shows that the system is upside down. These are the ones running your country, and they have no accountability, and they can make terrible decisions they will never have to answer for. All those MP’s are nice people but they will ultimately lose when the ship goes down, and it WILL go down. When you start hurting people, you're in trouble. The caucus doesn’t have the backbone. The are there because of Justin Trudeau, and they will sink with Justin Trudeau, and take the country with them.”
Dan McTeague former Liberal

​“People have to be civically engaged. Every bit of social responsibility you abdicate in your life, will be vacuumed up by a narcissistic tyrant.”
Jordan Peterson

​“There’s a push to erase what people have known and cared about until now, and to replace it with something new. Part of it has been the defaming of our history, running down the culture, and revisiting everything about our heritage, our ancestry, our past… painting it as evil and cruel and exploitive and white supremest. So bad that it is fit only to be destroyed and forgotten, and to be replaced with something else. After pandemic talk, and after war talk in Ukraine, it’s all about climate. People having just got off their private jets lecturing us about carbon use, telling us we have to eat less meat and dairy while sitting down to menus of beef and chicken and sea bass and salmon, drowned in cream sauces. The hypocrisy is galling. But, faith in human caused climate change is another faith. It’s a religion. If you question it, or deny it, you are a heretic. There’s always a tendency with an ideology, where it might start out a product of science and reason and rationale, when all else fails it becomes a religious faith. Just do it because we tell you, and if you don’t you’re a bad person. Eventually they’re talking us like children… JUST DO IT.
People who no longer have Christianity, there’s an emptiness and leaders will try to fill the void. They try to make whatever ideology they are pushing, the new religion. We are now being told that our past is rubbish and we should do away with it, and to worship something else. There’s a religiosity over how we are supposed to sacrifice for the planet. All the things that made life easier and better and allowed people to pull themselves into the modern world are being left behind. We’ve got a cast or characters at the moment, all singing from the same hymn sheet. They’re being influenced by the World Health Organization, and the World Economic Forum, and the United Nations, a centralized elite. I would like to think that the chances are that what they want to put in place will not outlive them. These leaders do not care about their countries. Their loyalties lie elsewhere. Their hearts are not in their own countries. Whatever that sinister ideology is all about, I don’t believe it’s what the masses want. They want things the way they were. This cohort of so called leaders, when their time has passed, there is a time we can look forward to, when the old ways will be re-established.”
Neil Oliver. 

“It must be noted that at the beginning of that century the vast majority of people living in England and her colonies, knew there were things worth fighting for, even if it meant dying for them. The cause for which so many English and Canadian soldiers gave their lives for, was a heartfelt application of the rule of law that was almost unique to Great Britain. 
When Britain fought Germany in the First World War, they understood that they were defending a view of law that could genuinely be referred to as a law of liberty. This charter came to England via the Magna Carta (Great Charter) and was signed by King John and his barons at Runnymede in 1215. Apart from England and her satellites, this charter for liberty has never really been embraced elsewhere. 
Today, as we honour Canada’s fallen,” let us remember that our liberties have recently been taken from us not by war, but by distraction. Ever since the Great War we have been dazzled by successive governments promising more benefits for the flesh while stamping out the liberties that encourage the growth of the soul. These governments have no love for, nor even memory of, the Charter that made England great and for a time allowed its satellite nations in the world to experience some brief moments of true liberty.
It’s time to take up McCrae’s torch once again and hold it high. We must not break faith with those who lie in Flanders fields.
Shafer Parker

“The Bible is not a tale of morality. It’s a book about reality.”
Matthew Pageau

“If you can profit by your connection to government, that’s corruption.”
​Holly Doan
​
“If you allow the government to break the law because of an emergency, they will always create an emergency to break the law.”
Protest sign in the Trucker’s Freedom Convoy 2022

​“What we did in the war on COVID, was to make a casualty of individual conscience. It sets the mark of a civil society that you should respect individual conscience. It’s been really sad to see how easily people will deploy human psychology against each another. There were some truly horrific headlines when the population was encouraged to turn on the vaccinated. We shouldn’t even need to discuss people’s reasons, it’s really nobody’s business.”
Laura Dodsworth

“It’s our responsibility as individuals to seek a direct relationship with the Truth, the Logos. We don’t need these characters to tell us the truth because they are not deserving of our trust. Governments when you get right down to it, are there to make sure the lights are on and the garbage bins are emptied. Everything else, they should leave people to get on with their lives. This indulgence to which they have treated themselves, that they deserve to be inside our heads, telling us what to think - THAT’S where we need a reformation.”
Neil Oliver

“MGTOW - Men going their own way...
​Last time I checked we used to call them bachelors.
And women going their own way, we used to call them spinsters.”
Rupa Subramanya

“…how did we get from ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ in 1939 to a perpetual state of pant wetting anxiety in 2022?”
Neil Oliver
​
“The Trudeau government, is at best, performative art.”
Brian Lilley, Toronto Sun

​“The only thing I can say about WOKE is, I woke up this morning on the right side of the grass.”
Newspaper Comments Section

“ Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old.
Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?
I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.”
​Isaiah 43:18-19

“The Prime Minister on his private jet, has just burned through the equivalent of my carbon dioxide emissions for 25 years, in less than a month. And for what? Frivolity and fun and photo ops. I don’t want to hear another word about MY carbon emissions from Justin Trudeau.”
Nigel Hannaford, Western Standard. 

​“Why is the family an enemy? Because it is our identity. Everything that defines us is now an enemy for those who would like us to no longer have an identity. When I am only a number, when I no longer have an identity or roots, then I will be the perfect slave.
Every single human being has a unique genetic code that is unrepeatable. And, like it or not, that is sacred. We will defend it. We will defend God, country and family. We will do it to defend our freedom because we will never be slaves and consumers at the mercy of financial speculators. That is our mission.”
Giorgia Meloni

“It’s hard not to feel disappointed in your government when every day there is a new scandal.”
Justin Trudeau - 2013

“I have lived to thank God that all my prayers have not been answered.”
Jean Ingelow

“As a parent, what you can see in the relationship with your own child, is the manifestation of the image of God.”
Jordan Peterson

​“To say that God is a mystery is to say that you can never nail him down.  Even with Christ the nails ultimately proved ineffective.”
Frederick Buechner

​“I have in sincerity pledged myself to your service, as so many of you are pledged to mine. Throughout all my life, and with all my heart, I shall strive to be worthy of your trust.” 
Queen Elizabeth II

"Each day is a new beginning. I know that the only way to live my life is to try to do what is right, to take the long view, to give of my best in all that the day brings, and to put my trust in God.” 
Queen Elizabeth II

​“Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.”
Teddy Roosevelt

​“If we used Justin Trudeau’s BS we could likely fertilize the crops with that but maybe the world couldn’t handle all that fertilizer.”
Todd Loewen

“The only real natural resource, is trust. It almost requires a metaphysical miracle to set up a country where trust is the default for human transactions. When you use compulsion to undermine that kind of trust, you generate an endless amount of conspiratorial thinking.”
Jordan Peterson

​“The environmental activists sacrifice today’s real poor to the hypothetically thriving poor of their utopian future. It’s morally appalling. And it’s not just ignorant, it’s darker than that.”
Jordan Peterson

​“Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.”
Jim Rohn

“A gentleman is someone who CAN play the accordion - but DOESN’T.”
Tom Waits

“Defence of Freedom must be lived out and enacted every moment of every day and thereby made real and kept livid with the flowing blood of the living. If we mouth the words about defending freedom and yet stand aside when those freedoms are erased, then we dishonour the dead and also each other.”
Neil Oliver

​“Out of every one hundred men, ten should not even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.”
Heraclitus.

“For many people what’s going on has become something fundamental and elemental and existential - that the governments, and the institutions the civil service, the police are not to be relied upon and are working against them. It’s not about left and right or labour and tories. It’s become a battle between good and evil, right and wrong, light and dark. I get a lot of letters from people of faith. Their faith was effectively the vaccination that mattered.”
Neil Oliver

​“Only two identities at either end of the categorical spectrum are worthy of acknowledgment as we navigate life, namely, that we all belong to the human family (the largest group of us possible), and that we all deserve to be treated as sovereign individuals (the smallest group possible).”
Newspaper Comments Thread. 

“All those contenders for the role of Prime Minister, are devoid of principle. Where is the candidate who will actually make necessary life enhancing changes to peoples’ lives, instead of fapping about unable or unwilling to describe what a woman is? This is the tenor of the debate, to distract us with things that don’t matter, and hope that we don’t pay attention to the things that do. I’m struck by the hollowness of the people who have the audacity to stand up and claim to be leaders. I am made weary by the apparent emptiness of them.”
Neil Oliver. 

“Cancel Culture reveals the radical ontological inconsistency of globalism in the face of the splendour of Christian civilization.”
​Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano

“The woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.”
Henry Van Dyke

​“I declare that I am a free man. I was born into a part of the world where I was taught that my freedom was won for me by men and women who died to make it so. Merely to live is not enough, not nearly. What matters is to live in freedom.”
​Neil Oliver

“As engaged citizens and stewards of our democracy, we must not back down when someone in power responds to a legitimate question with, “That’s a conspiracy theory”, or “stop talking, you're spreading dangerous misinformation”.  Let’s hold our elected officials to account, remind them that they are there to serve the people, and that we have the power to vote them out if they continue to dismiss our concerns by not answering questions with clear evidence.”
Leslyn Lewis

“The lack of coverage for the worldwide farm protests exposes the fact that the media is no longer reporting on behalf of the people. They are reporting for the corporate elites, the political class. That is what has been exposed. Hundreds of thousands of people are protesting and the media’s spin on it is “pay no attention to the large mass of people over there”.
Kim Iversen

“Victory is sweetest when you’ve known defeat.”
Malcolm Forbes
​​
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
​Sigmund Freud

“God doesn’t need me and he’s going to prove it one day. We’re going to die, someone’s going to get all our stuff, and the world’s going to keep on spinning. It’s not even going to slow down to acknowledge our loss.”
Voddie Baucham

“One of the indicators that you’re dealing with a false religious figure is if he is universally popular. How did Jesus put this? ‘Beware when all men speak well of you’. If all men speak well of you, there’s an excellent chance you are not speaking the truth.”
Bishop Robert Barron

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
Ayn Rand

​“It doesn’t matter how slowly you go as long as you don’t stop.”
Confucius

“After the covid layoffs, we hear about mass resignations and recruitment problems among doctors, nurses, legal staff, teachers, civil servants, military, police, etc. Governments spent billions, but screwed everything, pissed off everyone, and are now unable to offer services.”
Maxime Bernier

“Life always brings some issue to deal with. Cancer was mine. I have no complaints.”
Olivia Newton John

​“If you separate Western Civilization from its Judeo-Christian heritage, the worst things happen. Let’s be honest: the most evil things in modern history were carried out by people who hated Christianity. ”
Victor Orban

​“The Magna Carta in 1215 forced the King to accept that he was not above the law. And for the next 800 years anyone in power has sought to edit it, change it, water it down, and repeal its contents with laws and legislations. The men in suits and the judges with their wigs in high courts would rather that you think it doesn’t matter. But it’s we the people who are sovereign. Government, parliament, everything is subject to us. Trusting that people who pay attention, who listen to evidence, can come to an honest judgement is deeply and profoundly important.”
Neil Oliver

“A man without regrets cannot be cured.”
Aristotle

​“Praise be to the LORD my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle. ”
​Psalm 144:1

“People are no longer allowed in polite society to be religious or nationalistic. But people still have the desire for a meaningful identity. The ideology of climate change  fills this void perfectly, it’s a story that has heroes and villains, the end of the world is near, it has sacrifice, it’s full of struggle.”
Professor Ralph Schoellhammer

​“The leading cause of death in the 20th century was not cancer, it was genocide - governments killing their own people.
So I would say that not trusting the government does not turn me into a conspiracy theorist, it makes me a history buff.”
Fr. Robert McTeigue

“Character is one of the most effective means of persuasion.”
Aristotle

​“It is silence and compliance which enables tyrants.”
German MEP Christine Anderson

“It’s better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.”
Ancient Chinese Proverb

​“His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world… 2 Peter 1:3-4
Jesus partook of our humanity not just to save us; but to make it possible for us to partake of his divinity by having His own Holy Spirit indwell us.”
Father Edward Meeks

“Satanism has systematically been about Christianity from its very beginning, the Christian story, upside-down. Satanism is a parody of inversion, mocking everything Christians value. It has never been about worshipping the Devil, but about about the type of pride exemplified by Satan in his war against Heaven, which ends with self-worship and self-crowning. There’s always another pole-riding lap-dancing person next in line waiting to take the crown.”
Jonathan Pageau

“People are really bad at hiding what they’re doing it you pay attention. They’ll tell you what they’re up to.”
Jonathan Pageau

​Who controls the food supply controls the people
Who controls the energy can control whole continents
Who controls money can control the world
Henry Kissinger

“It’s NOT about going green, it’s about going without. It’s about grooming the world’s population, and especially the developed West to live meaner, colder, hungrier, smaller lives. That’s what Agenda 2030 boils down to. ”
Historian and Archeologist Neil Oliver

“The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.”
Marcus Aurelius

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” 
​Arthur Schopenhauer

“Poets do not compose their poems with knowledge, but by inspiration, like seers and prophets who also say many fine things without understanding what they say.”
Socrates

“Postmodernists don’t believe in basic biology, but they ACT like they do, because they all die.”
Jordan Peterson

“Whatever Justin Trudeau might lack in terms of intellectual sweep, he more than compensates by a certain instinct of cunning.”
Rex Murphy

​“When a clown moves into a palace, he does not automatically become a king. Rather, the palace becomes a circus.”
Turkish Proverb

“That men do not learn from the lessons of history is the most important lesson of history.”
Aldous Huxley

“People would learn from their mistakes if they weren’t so busy denying them.”
Harold J. Smith

“Do not look for wisdom in the pronouncements of Mr. Trudeau. That’s a ridiculous effort to begin with and it will give you no results whatsoever.”
Rex Murphy

​“There is no “relatively” free in freedom.”
Andy Lee

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price whatsoever for being wrong.”
Thomas Sowell

​“Justin Trudeau is one of the most obnoxious, sycophantic, ridiculous, idiotic, teenage girl in a boy’s body that I’ve ever seen.”
Ben Shapiro

​“Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”
C. S. Lewis
​
“It’s the death of a society to tolerate groups that don’t tolerate you.”
Newspaper Comments Thread
​
“Buy land. I’ve heard they’re not making it anymore.”
Mark Twain

​“As we’ve learned from history, the more government grows, the poorer the people will become.”
Newspaper Comments Thread

“The bankers and financial institutions are bent as a nine bob note. They are anti-people. They are anti-society. They are operating like crime families to enrich themselves on the back of the suffering of everybody else. That’s become the reality that for some reason we all accept. It’s in contradiction with common law, natural law which is older than any legal concept. It’s in the bedrock of all those things we know instinctively to be defined as right and wrong.We are allowing ourselves to live under the yoke of a tyranny that is upheld entirely by debt and our inability to escape from it.”
Neil Oliver

​“The biggest failure of all, is the failure to realize that you failed.”
Newspaper Comments Thread

“If the song “Imagine” could take human form and eat a Tide Pod, that would be Justin Trudeau.”
Ben Shapiro
​
“If I did not believe in God, I should still want my doctor, my lawyer, and my banker to do so.”
​G.K. Chesterton

“Show me a liar, and I will show thee a thief.”
- George Herbert

​“Nothing is more of a danger to democracy and the functioning of society than people who value freedom.”
Newspaper Comments Thread

​“Large firms like BlackRock are using the capital of everyday citizens to advance agendas that most of the citizens disagree with. There’s a name for this behaviour. It’s called a fiduciary breach. (A fiduciary duty is an acceptance of responsibility to act in the best interests of another person or entity).”
Vivek Ramaswamy
​
“Men cannot be men—much less good or heroic men—unless their actions have meaningful consequences to people they truly care about. Strength requires an opposing force, courage requires risk, mastery requires hard work, honour requires accountability.”
― Jack Donovan, The Way of Men

“It’s tragic to think that heroic man’s great destiny is to become economic man, that men will be reduced to craven creatures who crawl across the globe competing for money, who spend their nights dreaming up new ways to swindle each other.”
― Jack Donovan, The Way of Men

“When men evaluate each other as men, they still look for the same virtues that they’d need to keep the perimeter. Men respond to and admire the qualities that would make men useful and dependable in an emergency.”
― Jack Donovan, The Way of Men

“The cultural elite are but the glittering scum that floats on the river of production.”
Winston Churchill
​
“Not sure which is worse , a person who uses their race to gain an advancement or a society so debased and racist that they can.”
Newspaper Comments Thread

“If you cannot explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”
Albert Einstein

“I live in that solitude that is painful in youth but delicious in the years of maturity.”
Albert Einstein

“You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible.”
Thomas Sowell

​“When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier when it is called ‘The People’s Stick’”
Michail Backunin

“When institutions fail, our freedom is always the culprit.”
Newspaper Comments Thread
​
“If voting made a difference they wouldn’t let us do it.”
​Mark Twain

“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.”
General MacArthur

“Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?”
Thomas Sowell

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“If you have been voting for politicians who promise to give you goodies at someone else’s expense, then you have no right to complain when they take your money and give it to someone else, including themselves.”
Thomas Sowell

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes; our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”
G.K. Chesterton

​ “We are told that the fundamental motivation for human beings is power. There’s no place for people of good will to meet and engage in constructive dialogue, it’s all a mask for pretension and power. You could not formulate a more pathological philosophy. It obliterates your faith in society and it eradicates the notion of the individual, it removes the notion of good faith and good will, and it makes communication impossible.”
Jordan Peterson

“Don’t you just love new speak? Illegal becomes “irregular”. Confused becomes “Non Binary”. Lies becomes “misinformation”. Handicapped becomes “differently abled”. Coloured people become “people of colour”. Stunned becomes “woke”. Change becomes “progress”. Oh, yeah, this sure is progress.
Newspaper Comments Thread

​It's extremely easy, the side wanting to stifle free speech are the ones with something to hide.”
Newspaper Comments Thread

​“Foreign aid, is taking money from poor people in a rich country, and giving it to rich people in a poor country.”
Ron Paul

“The central underlying illness in Canada is monstrous growth in the power and cost of the state, at the expense of the agency and the freedom of the people.”
Pierre Poilievre

​“Government is really, legalized force. So, if you believe in big government you believe in expanding force. Relationships of force always favour the powerful. In reality those who have more political power, then benefit from bigger government and those people are all rich. They are disproportionately powerful within the system.”
Pierre Poilievre

​“Charity is no substitute for justice witheld.”
Saint Augustine of Hippo

​“And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it: but I found none.”
Ezekiel 22:30

​“Proverbs 29:18 tells us, where there is no vision the people perish. We might paraphrase that and say, where there is no wisdom, even the nice people will perish. Where there is no wisdom, even the nice DEMOCRATIC people perish. Where there is no wisdom, the people will devour their young. Where there is no wisdom, in the end people will devour themselves.”
Michael D. O’Brien

​“Radicals who accuse us all historically and as individuals of being motivated by the desire for power strike a chord, especially in people who are conscientious. If you’re a conscientious person and say like a little mob of thirty people comes to you and says ‘you know, you could be a little more careful in what you say and do on the racist front and the sexist front et cetera’, you’re likely to think, ‘well, I’m not perfect and there’s no doubt I could be a little more careful, and there’s no doubt that people have been oppressed in the past and it’s also no doubt that in some sense I’m the undeserving beneficiary of historical atrocity, so maybe I should look to myself’ and that’s weaponization of guilt and it’s very effective, and it’s not surprising. But it’s not helpful.”
Jordan Peterson 

​“Just what am I exactly supposed to do when I meet a graduate student or young professor, hired on diversity grounds? Manifest instant skepticism regarding their professional ability? What a slap in the face. The diversity equity inclusion ideology is no friend to peace and tolerance. It is absolutely and completely the enemy of competence and justice.”
Jordan Peterson

​“Justin Trudeau is a classic narcissist, a person who wants to be accredited with moral virtue in the absence of the work necessary to actually attain it.”
Jordan Peterson

“There are two types of Canadians. Those who are embarrassed by Justin Trudeau, and those who aren’t. 
Hence, our present mess.”
Stephen Ledrew

​“You have to get better the same way you got sick.”
Joe Rogan

​“Have you noticed that all the people in favour of abortion are already born?”
Newspaper comments thread

“All men have stars, but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travellers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems... But all these stars are silent. You-You alone will have stars as no one else has them.”
Le Petit Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

“This is not just an individualist or collectivist vs altruism debate; it’s also a debate about whether we are appropriately up-taking the information that feeds back into our current mental states and how fearful we are allowing ourselves to be. We haven’t seen any emphasis for the last two years on civil liberties. You know, when you talk about freedom of belief, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of communication. These are things that are not just luxuries. They’re not dispensable in times of crisis. The reason they are codified in our constitutions is because they are needed during times of crisis more than any other time. Without them these kind of unrestricted ideas of totalitarianism we began with just run rampant and get us to a place that is not only harmful but quite irrational.”
Dr. Julie Ponesse

​“May we agree that ‘What is a woman?’ is not a subtle or trick question?”
Rex Murphy

“What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.”
Sir Francis Bacon

​“The elite hate populism because they know what they’re pushing down our throats isn’t popular.”
Newspaper comments thread.

“Johnny Cash is the only man who could sing straight from the Bible and have a secular crowd sit still and listen.”
Comment from YouTube

​“Faith is logical but elusive; it will not be stamped out and there must be more to the world than the thin gruel of the atheists, or even the ambitious scientists.”
​Conrad Black

“The Risen Lord has robbed evil of its power.”
Pope Francis

​“You can vote your way into socialism but you are going to have to shoot your way out.”
​Newspaper comments thread

You can tell how old a person is by asking them for the meaning of the word “effable”.
Trevor Toop

“A nation which tries to tax itself into prosperity, is like a man who’s standing in the middle of a bucket trying to lift himself up by the handle. It won’t work.”
Winston Churchill

“Think about it. The death sentence for the woman found in adultery, was carried out, when Jesus died on the cross.”
Father Edward Meeks

“The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.”
Newspaper Comments Thread

​“Some call it coincidence. I call it an act of prayer.”
The Duke, Rough Cut Homestead

​“The final battle between God and the kingdom of Satan will be about Marriage and the Family. Don’t be afraid. Whoever works for the sanctity of Marriage and the Family will always be opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue. Nevertheless, Our Lady has already crushed his head.”
Sister Lucia dos Santos

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, Even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.”
Carl Sagan

​“Justin Trudeau runs a government that excels at being predictably inconsistent, transparently delusional, occasionally devious and excessively obsessed with the latest shiny object.”
​Don Martin

“Political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners.”
Jeckov Kanani
​
“We can confidently approach the throne of God to receive mercy and grace to help us in our time of need.”
Hebrews 4:16

“Our prayers can go where we cannot.”
Brother Andrew, Open Doors Netherlands. 
​
“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God.”
​1 John 3:1

“If you prefer Earth to Heaven, then Earth will ultimately become your Hell.”
​C.S. Lewis, “The Great Divide”

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.”
Abraham Lincoln
​
“we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with”
Jim Rohn

“There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen.”
​Vladimir Lenin
​
​“When you know everything about your government, that is democracy. When the government knows everything about YOU, that is tyranny.”
MEP Cristian Terhes, Romania

​“When we come to the understanding that we are loved, we have discovered fire for the second time.”
​Teilhard de Chardin

​“ A man asks Jesus, “How many will be saved?” and Jesus answers him not with how many, but “How?”
Jesus indicated, that the man asking should strive to enter by the narrow door. Let’s identify what the door is, or more accurately WHO the door is, because Jesus himself is the door. Jesus explicitly stated, “I am the door” and “No man shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven but by me.”
Father Edward Meeks

“Some of you may think we have the right to a paralyzing and devastating discouragement. Let me tell you, NO you don’t.
Let me tell you why we don’t have the right to remain discouraged and dispirited. Very simply because we are Christians. Our Lord and Saviour has told us repeatedly and emphatically, “ I have said this to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.​”
The virtue of hope is one of the theological virtues that along with faith in charity was instilled in you by God at your baptism. The theological virtues are the foundation of Christian moral activity. They animate it and give it special character. Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the Kingdom of Heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength by the grace of the Holy Spirit.
Hope keeps Man from discouragement. It sustains him during times of abandonment. It opens up his heart in expectation of eternal beatitude. Buoyed up by hope, he is preserved from selfishness, and led to the happiness that flows from charity. 
Optimism is no substitute for hope. Looking on the bright side when there IS no bright side, leads only to disillusionment and cynicism. The kind of hope we read about in the Scriptures is based on indestructible truth. Hope is not escapism, but realistic truth for living joyfully regardless of the circumstances that surround us. Christ IN you is the hope of glory.”
​Father Edward Meeks

​“We are being manipulated as never before in history. Even the medieval church could barely dream of such control over how people think. We nudge closer and closer to what is called compelled speech, when it’s not enough to think the supposedly right thing. That supposedly right thing must be broadcast for all to hear and see.”
Neil Oliver

​“Not all scars are visible.”
Neil Oliver

​“Vox Populi, Vox Dei”
Latin saying: the voice of the People is the voice of God.

​“Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”
G.K. Chesterton
​
“Wise men still find him, by his Mother...”
Catholic saying about Jesus

​“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.”
Confucius.
​
“When our Lord Jesus ascended back into Heaven, he very intentionally left on earth, an authority structure. A visible Church that would would be guided, guarded, and directed by the Holy Spirit through the agency of Men, operating in every age in apostolic ministry and authority.”
Father Edward Meeks

“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”
Galatians 5:1

​“Truth carries an anointing”.
Fr. Mark Goring, CC

“Thus saith the Lord; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord. For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited. Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.”
​Jeremiah 17: 5-8

​“if you have to choose between bread and freedom, choose freedom. If you choose bread you will end up with neither bread nor freedom, if you choose freedom, you will get both”
​Ukrainian saying

“You’re more likely in this country to hear a sermon in a church about climate change, or about Black Lives Matter, or about  than you are about Jesus Christ. That to me is sad. If I’m being charitable I’ll say these people are well intentioned and doing what they think is best. If I’m feeling less charitable and more cynical I’ll say they’ve actually lost the faith or found a new religion. I think a lot of people at this point are worshipping the environment.”
Calvin Robinson on the state of the Anglican church in Britain. 

​“The presence of injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Martin Luther King

“The United Nations cannot work because there will always be one country that gains power by breaking the rules.”
Victor Davis Hanson

“Each man in his own suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ.”
Pope John Paul II

“I choose to believe the Bible because it is a reliable collection of historical documents written down by eyewitnesses during the lifetimes of other eye witnesses. They report to us, supernatural events that took place in fulfillment of specific prophecies and claim that their writings are divine rather than human in origin.”
Voddie Baucham

​“Ideology without power is vanity. Power without ideology is pointless.”
Anonymous

“suaviter in modo, fortiter in re.” - Latin. (Gently in manner, firmly in action.)

“He who is ignorant of what happened before his birth, is forever a child.” 
​Cicero

​“The wicked flee when no one pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion.”
​Proverbs 28:1

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That’s home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.”
Carl Sagan on the Pale Blue Dot

“There are three types of people in the world. Sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Some people prefer to believe that evil does not exist in the world, and if it ever darkened their doorstep they would not know how to protect themselves. Those are the sheep. Then you have the predators. They use violence to prey on the weak. Those are the wolves. Then there are the rare few who have been blessed with the gift of aggression, with an overpowering need to protect the flock. These men are the rare breed who live to confront the wolf. They are the sheepdog.”
American Sniper

​“We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.”
Aesop 550 BC

​“Justin Trudeau is the archetype of what an effeminate man is, and he is the perfect representation of what has happened to the grit and manfully cultivated virtue that was once common in this nation.”
​Kennedy Hall
​
“Only when the tide goes out do you discover who has been swimming naked.”
Warren Buffet

“Bless the Lord, O my soul; And all that is within me, bless His holy name!
Bless the Lord, O my soul, And forget not all His benefits:
Who forgives all your iniquities, Who heals all your diseases,
Who redeems your life from destruction, Who crowns you with lovingkindness and tender mercies,
Who satisfies your mouth with good things, So that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.”
Psalm 103

“Listen to yourself talk, as if a stranger was talking. Try not to identify too much with what you are saying. Then, observe. See if what you are saying makes you feel stronger, physically, or weaker. If it makes you feel weaker, stop saying it. Try to reformulate your speech until you can feel the ground under your feet solidifying. Then practice only saying things that make you strong. Stop trying to use your speech to get what you want. You don’t necessarily know what you want. Instead, try to articulate what you believe to be true as carefully as possible. Then, accept the outcome. Assume that your truth, as lived and spoken, will produce the best possible outcome. It’s an act of faith. But so is every other way of being.”
Jordan Peterson

“The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.”
Saint Augustine of Hippo

“When in the course of human history has the side that’s doing the censoring and trying to shut people up and make them show papers and marginalize a part of the community ever been on the correct side?”
Aaron Rogers Green Bay Packers

“When politics and science meet, all you end up with is politics.”
Quote from Israel’s top vaccine expert.

“In the old days invading forces would capture the churches, granaries and wells. Nowadays they capture the media, schools and hospitals.”
Newspaper Comments Thread

“You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life.”
Rocky Balboa

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
C. S. Lewis

​“I think that each nation should have its own immune system that protects itself against bad ideas, damaging ideas, and to fight against that we should not just point fingers and shout at people, but we should support our own traditional values.”
Vladmir Putin

“This is the way you can recognize weaponized compassion. It ultimately makes you feel bad about something with the object of gaining more power over you. True compassion comes from the heart. You do not see compassion imposed on others anywhere in the Christian story. It is a disposition of the heart and the person. You can act ways which look compassionate on the outside and yet be very selfish on the inside. When you see an organization try to force compassion by law or by the power of the modern state we have a serious problem.”
Jonathan Pageau

“I wonder how many people I’ve looked at in my life and never seen.”
John Steinbeck

“Civil disobedience becomes a sacred duty when the state becomes lawless or corrupt.”
Mahatma Gandhi

“A man is lucky in life if he has one or two chances to rise to an occasion. Whether a man does or does not is something he will have to live with.”
​Anonymous

“They lied to us. We KNEW they lied to us and they knew we knew they lied yet still they lied and still we pretended to believe them.”
Alexander Solsynytzen

“Those who give up freedom for safety, loose both and deserve neither.”
Winston Churchill

“I would not fear an army of lions, if they were led by a sheep. But, I would fear an army of sheep, if they were to be led by a lion”.
Alexander the Great

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”
Karl Marx

​“Work slower; it’s faster.”
​Woodworking advice

“Man is the warmest place to hide.”
The Thing (sci-fi horror movie)
​
“One death is a tragedy one million are statistics”
Josef Stalin

​“Civilization is only nine meals away from anarchy.” 
Lord Cameron of Dillington

“An expert is a man who has stopped thinking. Why should he think? He is an Expert.”
Frank Lloyd Wright

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”  Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

“Power is not a means; it is an end.”
George Orwell, 1984

“When you mix politics and science you get political science. Political science is not really science. It’s bought and paid for opinion.”
Newspaper Comments Thread

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
George Orwell, 1984.
​
“Once upon a time it was assumed that words reflected reality. 
At least, it was assumed that some words did, such as ‘man’ and ‘woman.’
Assumption rested on the notion that the world had a particular structure and shape.
In our present age, both of these ideas are proving unpopular.”
Carl Trueman

“Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”
Josef Stalin

​You can spend an entire lifetime fighting injustice… and then you grow old.”
Trevor Toop

“I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear. Knowing what must be done does away with fear.”
Rosa Park

​“When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re telling the world that you fear what he might say.”
George R. Martin

​“Wokeism is nothing but a smokescreen for intolerance. It is an excuse to marginalize people you disagree with”
Newspaper Comments Thread

“Capitalism is the only economic system in human history that recognizes an individual’s right to own and therefore determine the course of their life, labor and property. That is the basis for it being moral.”
Newspaper Comments  Thread

“A sermon longer than fifteen minutes is pride.”
Orthodox Church Saying

“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.”
​Albert Einstein

“The worst thing about being an inspiration is that you have to be perfect.”
Anne McDonald

“One of the biggest forms of domestic terrorism in my country is the news instilling fear and stress in people every single day.”
Anonymous
​
“May he rest in peace. But he was a goof.”
Public obituary
​
“We see the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”
Louise Gluck
​
“For every carrot  you find, there’s a stick out there somewhere just waiting.”
​Anonymous

“If everybody’s at the front, of the line, then it’s not a queue anymore is it?” 
A co-worker dealing with deadlines
​
“The tragedy of life is not that the beautiful things die young, but that they grow old and mean.”
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
​
“Love your Enemies, for they tell you all your Faults.”
Benjamin Franklin
​​
“To call our ancestors  settlers is a profound disrespect of the realities of the past. They did not come to North America as a bunch of swaggering carpetbaggers, but as desperate poor folks who faced even worse prospects back home. They worked their butts off to make things better.”
Newspaper Comments Thread
​
“Modernity is really just a competition between story telling and reality. The story telling is winning.”
Anonymous

I stopped listening to the government when I realized they are the biggest form of corporation, with a monopoly on violence.”
Newspaper comments thread

​“It is impossible to make sense out of what is transpiring in the world right now just as an explanation of public health and in vaccine policy or antiviral policy, and I have become convinced that we're in a situation in which we’re all having our rights eroded and that there is a larger force beyond this.”
Dr. Robert Malone, Inventor of mRNA vaccine Technology

“We now live in a situation where there is no agreed sacred order. There is nothing BEYOND society to which we as a society as a whole can appeal for the moral and social ordering of how we live. And that creates a situation that is very unstable, very pragmatic, and constantly re-inventing itself.”
​Carl Trueman

​“Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.”
Cormac McCarthy, The Road

​ “What’s the bravest thing you ever did?
He spat in the road a bloody phlegm. Getting up this morning, he said.”
Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had absolutely no other place to go.”
​Abraham Lincoln

“The Christian account of evil is like no other. We do not know why evil happens and why God allows it, but at every point in the Biblical story, evil is faced for what it is, taken with the utmost seriousness, identified as the ultimate enemy of God, and humanity - bent on destruction, malevolent and determined. At every point in the New Testament this power is present and active and named: the Power of Sin and Death, the Ruler of this world, (John 12:31, 14:30, 16:11) the ‘Prince of the power of the air’ who is at work in those who are disobedient toward God (Ephesians 2:2). The calling of the Christian is to resist this evil.”
Fleming Rutledge

​“All democracies in the Western world have been mutating in the direction of the tripartite state … in which one-third of the people are producing the wealth, and one-third of the people are working for government, and another third are receiving significant income … from the government. At the ballot box, it’s like two wolves and a sheep debating what to have for dinner. The sheep goes ‘baa-aaa’ but he can’t do anything about it. It’s game over for the sheep.”
​William Gairdner

“Good judgement comes from experience, and that comes from a lot of ​ bad judgement.”
Will Rogers

​“My sense is that the Church does not demand enough of young people. And by not demanding enough it doesn’t indicate its faith in their possibility…. And this isn’t hit home. Look, the Church demands everything of you, absolutely everything. And the reason that people are leaving is because that adventure isn’t being put before them.”
Bishop Robert Barron

“There is a very, very thin line between a hobby and insanity.”
Werner Reich

“Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.”
Thoreau
​​
“The incarnation is a monumental rebuke of our misguided aspirations. It renders absurd any notion that rapprochement between God and humanity is accomplished from the side of humanity. We do not seek and find God; he pursues and overtakes a rebellious people. We do not approach his light; he penetrates our darkness.”
Marcus Johnson

“The Word became flesh! In this simple, but sublime enunciation, we have the whole gospel comprehended in a word … The incarnation is the key that unlocks the sense of all God’s revelations. It is the key that unlocks the sense of all God’s work’s, and brings to light the true meaning of the universe … The incarnation forms thus the great central fact of the world.”
​John Williamson Nevin

​“Preaching at user-friendly church? Preachers have got a problem. And the problem’s name is Jesus. When, in seeker-sensitive services, do we pull out the cross? When, as we’re touting all the benefits of choosing Jesus, do we also say to them, “By the way, Jesus said that anyone who bought into his message would also suffer and die.”
Will Willimon

“To be a Christian means gradually, Sunday after Sunday, to be subsumed into another story, a different account of where we have come from and where we are going, a story that is called “gospel.” You are properly called a “Christian” when it’s obvious that the story told in Scripture is your story, above all other stories that the world tries to impose on you, and that the God who is rendered in Scripture is the God who has got you.”
Will Willimon

“Judgemental is a relatively new word. It doesn’t appear in the authoritative Oxford English dictionary until the twentieth century. Prior to that judgement was considered a positive thing, meaning to discern its truth or value. The capacity to judge accurately was a form of exercising wisdom.”
Fleming Rutledge

“Our salvation is played out with the Devil, a devil who is not merely generalized evil, but an evil intelligence determined on its own supremacy.”
Flannery O’Conner

​“Never tell me that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.”
​George Orwell

“Good prose is like a windowpane.”
George Orwell
​
“Imagine for just a moment if Christ called a meeting of His disciples to strategize how to moderate His tone so as not to offend the Pharisees.”
​Tom Basile

“Our lives are eschatologically stretched between the sneak preview of the new world being born among us in the Church, and the old world where the principalities and powers are reluctant to give way. In the meanwhile, which is the only time the church has EVER known, we live as those who know something about the fate of the world that the world does not yet know. And that makes us different.”
Will Willimon
​
“The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined... For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even   for ever. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will perform this.”
​Isaiah 9:2-7

“ I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and they brought him near before him. And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.”
​Daniel 7:13-14

“We’re not living in a very liberal era when it comes to speech. We’re living in an era that has many anxieties verging on hysteria about the dangers of unfettered discussion.”
Former CRTC commissioner Timothy Denton

“Gratitude is the father of all other virtues.”
Cicero

​“The extent to which the Church capitulates to the Spirit of the Age, is the extent to which her moral authority is rendered null and void. ”
Father Edward Meeks
​


“Simultaneously trying to sell the 3rd and 4th shots to people who took the first 2,
while trying to sell the 1st as ‘highly effective’ to people who have taken none, is a bold strategy.”
Newspaper Comments Thread

“The best things in life are sitting on the other side of fear.”
George Addair

“A flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it. It just blooms.”
Zen Shin

“Do something that you don’t like to do, every single day. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.”
Mark Twain

“The most important two days of your life, are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
Mark Twain

​“Vaccines are the leading cause of coincidences.”
Newspaper Comments Thread

​“Canada is in trouble because those who work for a living are now outnumbered by those who vote for a living.”
​Newspaper Comments Thread

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
​Friedrich Nietzsche

“Against stupidity we have no defense. The fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied and can easily become dangerous. It does not take much to make him aggressive. Never try to persuade the stupid person with reason, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
​Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“If you show your papers to attend a Remembrance Day ceremony you’ve already forgotten. Lest we forget.”
Veteran arrested in Calgary on Remembrance Day for failing to wear a mask... outdoors. 
 
“If you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”
​Jordan Peterson

“Western democracy is based around the sovereignty of the individual - not the individuality’s responsibility to the group.
​It’s a complete perversion and re-imagining of our culture, and it’s not acceptable from our Prime Minister.”
Mark Paralavos

“When the solution is socialism, the problem is not real.”
Newspaper Comments Section

“If you wake up and feel like you are going it alone, just remember that in the first century, Jesus was born into occupied territory.”
Bishop Strickland
​
“The reasons we went to war in the first place: freedom.
Freedom to prosper from the work of our hands.
Freedom of assembly.
Freedom of free speech and freedom of ideas
Freedom of movement
Freedom to fight tyranny
Just freedom.”

Newspaper Comments Thread

“We are faced with a colossal deception, based on lies and fraud.
This deception starts from the premise that the justifications put forward by the authorities in support of their actions are sincere.
​More simply, the mistake consists in believing that the rulers are honest and in assuming that they do not lie to us.”
​Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano

In his Glasgow Climate meeting Trudeau proposed the following:
“Limit  allowable miles travelled by motor vehicle, train or air for individual Canadians”
Trudeau wants strangers from abroad to police what we do here at home.
​
“Never, never, NEVER give in, except to convictions of honour and good sense.”
​Winston Churchill

“Carbon taxes don’t bring down emissions.
​What carbon tax does, is to create a government shadow economy that no one accounts for. ”
Anthony Furey

“I remember the days we treated viruses with soup and rest ..... now we treat them with communism and fascism.”
Newspaper Comments Thread

“In Canada, we have made meekness and compliance virtues.
​It’s shocking. The same country that sent thousands to heroically defend freedom.”
Newspaper Comments Thread

“If you want racism to disappear stop talking about it.”
Morgan Freeman

​I look to a day when people will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
​Martin Luther King

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
H. L. Mencken

“Trudeau and his team aspire to be reformers on a grand scale …
their lack of experience for succeeding in that goal is becoming more and more apparent.”
former Prime Minister Jean Cretien

“How do we ‘build back better,’ given that there’s actually not much building back to be done? I mean, look out a window. The world of 2019 is still there, dusty but intact. This isn’t 1945. Stop saying it’s 1945.”
​Paul Wells, MacLeans

“If everybody is thinking alike , then somebody isn’t thinking.”
​General George Patton

“If the main pillar of the totalitarian system is living a lie, it’s no surprise that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth. This is why the truth must be suppressed more than anything else.”
James Lindsey

​“With the Holy Spirit as your shield and Christ as your sword may you join Saint Michael and all the other angels in defending God and sending Lucifer and his henchmen straight back to hell where they belong.”
Jim Caviezel

“In the last two years, the difference between conspiracy theory and MSM news is a wait of about 6 months.”
Newspaper Comments Section

“Any time politicians unanimously agree on anything, I generally feel they’re trying to hide something.”
Newspaper Comments Section

“I propose a Quebec deal for all. We are all distinct.”
Newspaper Comments Section
​
“Men, remember that Saint Joseph - even while he was sleeping was spiritually awake and able to protect his wife and child. ”
Father Mark Goring

“ Keeping in mind that being a Justin Trudeau cabinet minister means you’re a force-fed enabler of the Prime Minister’s agenda more than influencer of policy direction, there are good, bad and ugly moves to be observed in Tuesday’s swearing-in ceremony. The over-arching theme is how this gaggle of ministers is more lapdog than usual, where a long, loyal, sycophantic friendship to the prime minister appears to be THE critical consideration for a ticket to The Show.”
​Don Martin

“If memory was not balanced with forgetfulness, life would be a nightmare.”
Dr. Scott Small

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
​George Orwell

“Nowadays a host of issues are liable to provoke sneers, not syllogisms. Such an attitude worsens the problem it seeks to address. Asking intelligent questions is not merely a permitted luxury but a civic duty. Remember, weak arguments will not prevail in open debate. We must be able to hear and also willing to listen, and if we end up not agreeing, to explain why instead of hurling insults.​ The idea seems to be that as soon as we slap those clods around hard enough that they comply, we can go back to being free-thinking individualists, so stop asking questions and start hitting. But this plan strikes me as highly dubious, as counterproductive in the short run as it is ominous for the future.”
John Robson

“A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian - unless the ‘wrong people’ need EI. Refusing to give EI to those fired due to their vaccination status is fear-based manipulation, in this case, the fear of financial ruin. In a country where the government can’t outright kill people with impunity, financial ruin is the next ‘best’ thing. Until we stop demonizing and threatening people, any claim of ‘a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian‘ will serve only to illuminate the brutal hypocrisy of those in charge.”
​Spencer Fernando

“Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”
Milton Friedman, American economist

“it is precisely Christian doctrine – including the fine distinctions made with regard to central beliefs like the Trinitarian nature of God; the nature and purpose of the Church; the Incarnation; the Redemption; and the sacraments – that frees people from worldly ideologies and assures that they are actually preaching and teaching the authentic, life-giving Gospel.”
​Father Thomas Weinandy

“Theology may be the only academic pursuit where one can seemingly be considered a theologian without actually having to know the subject matter. It would appear at times that a theologian need not actually know God.”
Father Thomas Weinandy

“Such behaviour gives the impression that your views cannot survive theological scrutiny, and so must be sustained by ad hominem arguments.”
Father Thomas Weinandy in a private letter to Pope Francis

“The impact of the crisis in the world and in the Church is profound for all of us. Many are enduring the most painful suffering, physical, emotional and spiritual, which such a situation necessarily causes. At a time when we most need to be close to one another in Christian love, worldly forces would isolate us and have us believe that we are alone and dependent upon secular forces which would make us slaves to their godless and murderous agenda.”
Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke

“I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.’
Surely he will save you from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence.
He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.
You will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness,
nor the plague that destroys at midday.”
Psalm 91

“The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the LORD is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?”
Psalm 27:1

“When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there but it is still there.
​Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”
Valery Legasov

“Keep your common sense, folks. It’s one of the few tools we have left.”
​Newspaper Comments Section

“Every day is a little weirder than the one before.”
Newspaper Comments Section

“In the normal world ‘meandering facts’ are called lies.”
Newspaper Comments Section
​
“I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.”
​Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“We are at war: a war that is not openly declared, that is not fought with conventional weapons, but a war all the same, in which there are aggressors and aggressees, executioners and victims, kangaroo courts and prisoners; a war in which violence is used in ostensibly legal forms in order to violate the rights of citizens as well as believers. It is an epochal war that is a prelude to the end times and the great apostasy
spoken of in Sacred Scripture.”
​Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano

“What is worldliness? That system of values, in any given age, which has at its centre our fallen human perspective, which displaces God and his truth from the world, and which makes sin look normal and righteousness seem strange. It gives great plausibility to what is morally wrong and, for that reason, makes what is wrong seem normal.”
​David F. Wells

“We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. I do not think that the Christian community realize this fully. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel. This confrontation lies within the plans of divine Providence; it is trial which the whole Church must take up. It is a test of 2,000 years of culture and Christian civilization with all of its consequences for human dignity, individual rights, human rights and the rights of nations.”
Pope John Paul II

“No matter how it comes, death wasn’t part of God’s good plan. Neither were aging, illness, dementia, or disability. We grieve with hope, rejoicing even as we sorrow. For we know our loved ones are safe in His presence, and we will most certainly join them.”
​Patsy Kuipers

“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.”
C.S. Lewis

“What is faith? It’s what happens in the void.
No matter what else is at hand, faith understands that goodness, purity, and wholeness exist out there SOMEWHERE.
​Faith is latching on to the orientation that is going to get you to that place somehow, some day, no matter what.”
​Trevor Toop

“Personal convictions are everything. Personal convictions, at the end of your life, are all you really have.”
Newspaper Comments Thread

“The healthy have come to be considered as potential sick people and plague spreaders, as propagators of death, and visa versa, the vaccinated who are contagious as the only ones presumed to be healthy….
This is the absurdity of what we have seen happening over a year and a half. There is prohibition of effective treatment, and imposition of experimental therapies with new gene technologies which, while not curing the consequences of the virus, cause genetic modifications and side effects, heart attacks, myocarditis, and the death of people otherwise healthy.”
Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano

​“True religion is real living; living with all one's soul, with all one's goodness and righteousness.”
Albert Einstein

“Through death we may as well be forgotten in time. But in Christ we are known eternally by the Father with the same intimacy and affection he has for his own Son.”
Matthew McCullough

“Do not be afraid! Open, indeed, open wide the doors to Christ! To his saving power. Do not be afraid! Open, indeed, open wide the doors to Christ! Jesus Christ is King and Lord of History, in His hands are the fates and destinies of each of us, of all nations and of Holy Church. He will not allow us to succumb to the onslaught of the enemy of mankind. Return! Let us all return to him, with the trust of the prodigal son who humbly asks his father to forgive him and to welcome him back into his home. Let us return to being Christians, proud of our Faith and of the civilization that Religion has built up over the course of two thousand years of history.”
Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano

“The crust presented by the life of lies is made of strange stuff. As long as it seals off hermetically the entire society, it appears to be made of stone. But the moment someone breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, ‘The emperor is naked!’– when a single person breaks the rules of the totalitarian game, thus exposing it as a game – everything suddenly appears in another light and the whole crust then to be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably.”
Victor Havel

“...the time is at hand. He that is unjust, let him be unjust still, and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still, and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still, and he that is holy, let him be holy still. And behold I come quickly, and my reward is with me to give every man according (to) his work....”
​Revelation 22: 10–12

“Remember this November 11 - Lest we forget? Well, we forgot, didn’t we?”
Newspaper Comments Section

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.” - Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

​“Justin Trudeau reminds me of Christian Bale in American Psycho. He peels off his blackface in the mirror every morning and he memorizes some woke slogans while selling some fighter jets on the side. (Laughter) I always like to imagine a scene of him as having laid down a plastic tarpaulin and he’s axing to death the most white cisgender member of his cabinet…“
Heydon Prowse GB News

“The modern mentality as it makes its way, finds support in human experience, and in affirmation of the trancendence of the human person. Man goes beyond himself. Man must go beyond himself. The tragedy of atheistic humanism is that it strips man of his transcendental character, destroying his ultimate significance as a person.”
​Pope John Paul II

“I believe in Christological preaching. There is a difference between the Jesus Kerygma, the words and deeds of Jesus as opposed to the Christ Kerygma, which includes the Jesus Kerygma, but is based within the Christology of John, the Christology of Paul, the Christology of Revelation, and within the Christology of the Nicene Creed. ”
Fleming Rutledge

“Forgiveness is not enough. There has to be rectification of Evil.”
Fleming Rutledge

“This is one of the most expensive photocopies we’ve ever had...”
Liberal staff commenting on 2021 election

“Don’t waste your time tugging on green fruit.”
Jesse Romero

​“It is too humiliating for the Liberal ideologues to admit to themselves what Trudeau has become, for to do so would be to admit what they have become.”
Andrew Coyne

​“If the West isn’t careful, it might shortly be all over for the West.”
Neil Oliver
​
“The best laid plans never survive first contact with the enemy.”
Moltke the Elder

“In the present phase of European history the essential issue is no longer between Catholics and Protestants, but between Christianity and Chaos.”
Evelyn Waugh
​
“Only a FRIEND can betray you.”
Father Edward Meeks

“A society operates by one of two principles, by truth, or by power.”
Greg Koukl
​
“Isn’t it strange how the protected need to be protected from the unprotected by forcing the unprotected to use the protection that didn’t protect the protected?”
​Newspaper Comments Section

“Politicians should not be warning Canadians. Canadians should be warning politicians.”
Newspaper Comments Section

“Like most of Ottawa, pollsters don’t believe the rest of the nation really exists.”
​Newspaper Comments Section

“Keep the company of those who seek the truth - run from those who have found it”
 Vaclav Havel

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
Bertrand Russell

“True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”
C.S Lewis

​“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”
C.S Lewis

“I am a Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I think wrong, and free to choose those who shall govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind.”
John Diefenbaker

“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”
Voltaire

“One of the ministries that is key to advancement in the Christian life is also one of the most overlooked, is the ministry of being just a little bit further along. What most people need and long for as they face trials and encounter questions is simply the dedicated attention of someone who is a few steps ahead on the path of life. Someone who will informally mentor them  with the godly wisdom they have accumulated along the way. Each of us is just a little bit further along than someone else. Each of us can prayerfully look back and extend a helping hand, a word of advice, a prayer of intercession. Each of us can take up this ministry of blessing and encouragement, of Word and prayer, of time and attention. For we have the one key credential: we are a little bit further along.”
​Tim Challies

“Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God, that which is God’s. I have been thinking through the psychological and political ramifications of this. Once you stop rendering unto God, what is God’s, once you muddy up the religious domain or remove it completely, all kinds of things which should not be religious BECOME religious. There’s no getting rid of the instinct. It just transfers to something else. That’s where things like climate change and land acknowledgements come from. They have become religion.”
​Jordan Peterson

“If you missed the six o’clock news you are UN-informed, if you did see the six o'clock news you are MIS-informed.”
Anonymous

“War is when the government tells you who the bad guy is. Revolution is when you decide that for yourself.”
Benjamin Franklin

​“Words without actions are the assassins of idealism”
Herbert Hoover

“Having a clear faith , based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along by every wind of teaching, look like the only attitude acceptable to today’s standards. We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.”
​Pope Benedict XVI

“As men become indifferent to right and wrong, disorder and chaos increase, and the State steps in to organize the chaos by force. Dictatorships arise in such a fashion. Such is the essence of Socialism, the compulsory organization of chaos.”
Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

“When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more noble her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.”
Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

“The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.”
Ayn Rand.

​“If only Karl would spend his time EARNING capital instead of WRITING about it....”
Karl Marx’s wife Jenny

“When great causes are on the move in the world... we learn that we are spirits, not animals, and that something is going on in space and time that is beyond space and time....”  
Winston Churchill

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong at the broken places.”
Ernest Hemingway

“Canada voted for Justin Trudeau because we thought he'd be a reflection of his father. Unfortunately, he's a reflection of his mother.”
​Norm MacDonald

One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
​Milton Freedman

“My faith comes from extremely simple reasoning. I don’t believe in the clock, without believing in the Clock Maker. I don’t think anything can be achieved without someone who designed and built it. So I have faith. I have a lot of faith in the One who made the world. Whoever puts their life in the hands of the One who created it, who wants Him, desires and loves Him, puts their life in good hands.”
Andre Bocelli

“Everything that we know, discover, and understand about the global conspiracy currently unfolding shows us a tremendous reality that is also at the same time sharp and clearly-defined: there are two sides, the side of God and the side of Satan, the side of the children of Light and the side of the children of darkness. It is not possible to come to terms with the Enemy, nor is it possible to serve two masters. Hoping to build a world government in which the Divine Kingship of Jesus Christ is outlawed is insane and blasphemous, and no one who has such a plan will ever succeed.”
Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano

“In order to understand this alliance between civil and religious power, it is necessary to recognize the spiritual and eschatological dimension of the present conflict, framing it in the context of the war that Lucifer, ever since his fall, has waged against God. This war, whose outcomes have been decided with the inexorable defeat of Satan and the Antichrist and the overwhelming victory of the Woman encircled with the stars, is now approaching its conclusion. This is why the forces of darkness are so wild at present, so impatient to cancel the name of Our Lord from the earth, to not only destroy his tangible presence in our cities by tearing down churches, demolishing crosses, and suppressing Christian holidays; but also by eliminating memory, cancelling Christian civilization, adulterating its teaching, and debasing its worship.”
Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano

“...for 60 years now we’ve been told to let it all hang out but some of it needs tucking in.”
John Robson

“Everything woke goes to shit.”
​Donald Trump

“The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose. It will defend itself.”
Saint Augustine

“Today we have swapped what works for what sounds nice.”
​Thomas Sewell

“If you are still voting, you are in denial of reality.”
Mark Twain

“The difference between Communism and Socialism is that under Socialism Central Planning ends with a gun in your face, whereas under Communism Central Planning begins with a gun in your face.”
Kevin D. Williamson

“Racism is not dead, but it is on life support -- kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as racists.”
Thomas Sowell

“The word that should trouble us most is ‘imagine’…. Is it really a good idea to place economies under the servitude of imagination? You cannot dream an economy - although it is very possible to kill the one we already have.”
Rex Murphy

“An era ends when all of its illusions have been exhausted.”
Arthur Miller

“Save yourselves from this perverse generation.”
​St Peter, Acts 2:40

“Weak men cannot handle power. It will either crush them, or they will use it to crush others.”
Jocelyn Murray

​“The glory of young men is their strength: and the beauty of old men is the grey head.” Proverbs 20:21  “The silver-haired head is a crown of glory, If it is found in the way of righteousness.” Proverbs 16:31  “This crown is not a symbol of office but a recognition of achievement. It is not merely bestowed, but has to be earned. This isn’t the kind of crown that’s placed upon the head of a king at his coronation, but the kind of crown that’s placed upon a winner at his victory celebration. And while any crown carries authority, this kind of crown carries authority related to achievement—authority that comes when someone has proven his mastery of something.”
​Tim Challies

“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.”
George Orwell

“For centuries in the West, and perhaps particularly in the United States, Christians have enjoyed being in the rooms where things happen. But now the wind of society is less at our backs and more in our faces. For the first time, perhaps, we need to learn how to live well in Babylon.”
​Alistair Begg

“When the ideologues’ bias distorts or ignores evidence from the past, a bad kind of revisionism emerges. It masquerades on as history. Such revisionism needs to be exposed and dismantled. It undermines proper understanding of our world. Failure to expose bad scholarship means that those who DO know the past are condemned to repeat its errors at the hands of those who merely pretend to.”
Professor Mark Kalthoff - Hillsdale College

​“Modern slaves are not in chains, they are in debt.”
Author unknown

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”
Alexander Fraser Tyler

“Be nobody special. Do your job. Take care of your family. Clean your house. Mow your yard. Read your Bible. Attend worship. Pray. Watch your life and doctrine closely. Love your spouse. Love your kids. Be generous. Laugh with your friends.  Be honest. Be kind to your waitress. Expect no special treatment. And do it all quietly. You want to be a spiritual hero? Ironically, you have to give it up. To distinguish yourself in our world, you must be happy about being a nobody.”
​Tim Challies

Over the entrance to a wrestling school in ancient Greece was this phrase: Strip or Retire. The inscription served as a challenge to each man entering the gymnasium: come in, participate, and struggle — or keep out. Mere spectators were not welcome.

To Risk
To laugh is to risk appearing the fool.
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental.
To reach out is to risk involvement,
To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self.
To place your ideas and
dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss.
To love is to risk not being loved in return,
To live is to risk dying,
To hope is to risk despair,
To try is to risk failure.
But risks must be taken because
the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing.
The person who risks nothing, does nothing,
has nothing, is nothing.

— William Arthur Ward (1921-1994)

​“Christian, be okay with being out of step with the culture. Be at peace with the name-calling, the threats, the marginalization or even persecution. If we are in Christ, we’re on the right side of history. They may call it old-fashioned, but God calls it faithful.”
​Theology and Life blog


“God spoke and acted in time and history as one who is distinct from time and history. God spoke and acted within the created order as someone wholly different from the created order.  In theological terms, this is called the transcendence of God. God is separate and wholly other than created things.”
Thomas G. Weinandy – Jesus the Christ. 

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”
Thomas Sowell

“Consensus is what happens when scholars are lazy.”
Newspaper Comments Thread

“But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. And he came and preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.”
​Ephesians 2:13-19

“The mantra “no justice no peace’ rings hollow in my ears. When I hear that, I want to shout out, ‘THE DEATH OF JESUS CHRIST IS THAT JUSTICE!!!!’. All other justice is proximate and insufficient. It is because of Jesus Christ’s work on the cross that we can heed the Apostle Paul’s admonition: ‘Let all bitterness and anger and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, kind and forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.’(Ephesians 4:31-32)’”
Voddie Baucham

“For the Lord GOD will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed.”
Isaiah 50:7

“I don’t think we should be ‘risk takers’ I think we should be people who do God’s will no matter what. Sometimes the Lord asks us to do things the world“ would consider to be risky. The important thing is learning to discern God’s will. It’s something that we as Christians should be good at. I have a formal discernment process built into my prayer journal where I try to discern what it is God wants me to do, some small step to move forward.”
Father Mark Goring

“The birth rate is a sober, unfalsified vote count of what our citizens think about life in our country. Do they think it’s worth passing along? Or must we rely on strangers coming in and replacing our culture with their own?”
 John Zmirak 

​“Singing the blues ain’t about trying to feel better; It’s about trying to make everybody else feel worse.”
​Bleeding Gums Murphy

“Your scars reveal you have a past. Christ’s scars reveal you have a future.”
Anonymous

“Real love is not passive, because one cannot feel it without being ready to fight for it.”
​G. K. Chesterton

“Pain is weakness leaving the body.”
US Marines 

​“The body, and it alone is capable of making visible what is invisible; the spiritual and the divine.”
​Pope John Paul II

The story of the demoniac Jesus healed in Luke 8:26-39:
Once healed he wants to follow Jesus who instead sends him home to live with his family. If you consider this man’s family life was broken - he was living amongst the tombs cutting himself... Jesus is pointing to the sanctity of the intact family. His job was to go home and live his family life to the full. Now THAT is interesting. A religious vocation is not necessarily institutional.

“If Jesus is a name which means ‘God saves’ what is he saving us from? It can’t just be from a bad day. I would go on to say that he is saving us from something real and something evil – namely the Devil himself and his demons.”
Father Vince Lampert

“Those who don’t understand history are doomed to repeat it. Those who DO study history are doomed to stand by while everyone ELSE repeats it.”
Newspaper Comments Thread

​“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.”
Soren Kierkegaard

“If voting REALLY made a difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.”
​Newspaper Comments Section

“The real problem in the west is not that our prospects are bad, it’s the elements within society that want to destroy it all. The modern left, while called Marxist is not socialist at all. Its ethics are entirely nihilist. It’s rip everything down. It’s all bad and it needs to be opposed. The adolescent egos of the WOKE university crowd is not a alternative governing philosophy for ANY society.”
Stephen Harper

“We are being told to look at the science for answers. What’s going now is not scientific. It’s more like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it sticks.”
Newspaper Comments Section

“Justin Trudeau has never met a mirror he didn’t like”
​Newspaper Comments Section

“I have come to realize that culture does matter, that not all cultures are equal, that Christian culture has produced the highest levels of freedom and prosperity, and the lowest levels of corruption and oppression in the world.”
Voddie Baucham

“In the face of injustice, lack of anger is a sign that reason is also lacking.”
Saint Thomas Aquinas

“Over 30,000 Syrian refugees were brought to Canada in an expedited manner and found themselves immediately taken care of by the Trudeau government. Despite Canada recognizing the genocide of Yazidis, the fact that the Trudeau government offered to help only 1,200 Yazidis speaks for itself. And absolutely no help was offered to the Christian victims of ISIS.”
​Steve Maman

“The difference between animals and humans is that animals never let the dumbest lead them.”
​Newspaper comments thread

“And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them.”(Ephesians 5:11) “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” (Ephesians 6:12)


“When government turns the divine design on its head and protects those who do evil and makes those who do good afraid, it forfeits its divine purpose. In our world today rulers are designing a culture that protects the immoral. It even has reached the point where it desires to protect criminals, and makes those who do good afraid. When the criminals are unrestrained because they don’t fear the consequences, but the police are restrained because they fear the consequences of stopping criminals, you know everything is turned on its head. Our government is the source of lies and the protector of liars, and the enemy of those who speak the truth.”
​John MacArthur

Interesting to note who operated the guillotines during the French Revolution: The Committee of Public Safety.

​“The law is king, not the man.”
Thomas Paine

​“For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ.”
2 Corinthians 10:4-5

“...earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints. For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.”
​Jude 1:3-4

“It is not the habit of the the government to announce announcements that we’re going to be announcing later.”
Justin Trudeau on government policy…

“We have taken the knee to so many irregular and false notions and paid artificial respect to them. The triumph of hypocrisy has alway had some attendants but never like it has today.”
​Rex Murphy

“You can’t assume that the amount of melanin you have automatically means you carry the burden of someone else’s offence. That’s not only untrue, it’s WRONG. We have authentic relationships with people. And if I can’t say something to you without you assuming the worst and taking offence and then shutting down, then we didn’t have a relationship to begin with.” 
Voddie Baucham

​“Sometimes the truth is far simpler than all the complexity. We need to get behind Jesus Christ. Not Paul, not Apollo, Jesus Christ. Look to Christ Himself. Listen to his words. There has been a tendency to bracket off the hard stuff, the difficult messages. We really need to embrace the full teaching of Jesus Christ. I have heard people say we need to update those messages according to popular culture but that is not true. We need to conform to them.”
Bishop Joseph Strickland

“Is not My word like a fire?” says the Lord, “And like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?”
Jeremiah 23:29

​“America: offended by everything but sin.”
Aimee Paxton on Twitter

“When a society becomes obsessed with moral purity tests, it's a sure sign of decadence.”
Newspaper comments thread

“Liberty means genuine freedom of speech, association, contract and property. Not freedom to use them for approved purposes.”
John Robson

“Men make revolutions for private reasons.”
Aristotle

​“There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he does not mind who gets the credit.”
​the plaque President Reagan kept on his desk

“My parents are pretty liberal. I don’t think they’ll kill me.”
Sarah Haider, Ex Muslims of North America

​“Nice people do not change anything. It is GOOD people who change things. People who obey the word of God have changed the world. They had to challenge evil to do this. People will have to make a choice whom they are going to serve.”
Pastor Artur Powlowski, Calgary

“For those of us getting older, some of the best good news in the Bible notes that while the storm was raging outside, Jesus was in the back of the boat taking a nap.”
Trevor Toop

​“Christianity was designed to thrive from the margins.”
Rev Paul Carter

​“Make every product better than it’s ever been done before. Make the parts you cannot see as well as the parts you can see. Use only the best materials, even for the most everyday items. Give the same attention to the smallest detail as you do to the largest. Design every item you make so as to last forever.”
​Shaker Philosophy of Furniture Making

“He who reigns within himself and rules his passions, desires, and fears, is more than a king.”
​John Milton

“What is a man, if his chief good, and market of his time, be but to sleep, and feed? A beast, no more.”
​William Shakespeare

“Jesus, who died for our sins, and rose again from the dead, we worship You on this Your day. You are the resurrection and the life. You brought life and immortality to light in Your gospel. You could not be held of death — but conquered it, thus vanquishing the last enemy.
We rejoice today in the blessings which You have brought to us by Your resurrection. You are a Saviour who has met every power of evil, and has overcome every enemy. We have nothing to fear even in death, for You have proved Yourself Lord of death, and have the keys of the grave. You will rescue all Your people from death’s power.
You are a Saviour who was dead — but who now lives to die no more. We have You for a living Friend and Companion. We are sure of Your help, O strong Son of God, in our every time of need, trial, and danger.
On this Lord’s day we think of You as away beyond death, and able therefore to lead us through death. Bring us into living fellowship with Yourself. May this be to us a resurrection day, a day of victory over some old sin, a day of new life and hope. Help us to conquer some earthly desire, and enter into some new freedom. May we rise into newness of life.
May You make this Sunday one of real blessing to us and to many others. Bless the churches everywhere. Let the power from on high be given to all who preach the gospel and to all who teach in the Sunday schools. Help us to open our hearts to receive Your love and the power of Your Holy Spirit. And we will give all the praise to the Father through You, O Jesus, our Saviour. Amen.”
​Prayer of J. R. Miller


“Not all Grits are horse thieves but all horse thieves are likely Grits (Liberals)”.
​Sir John A. MacDonald

“The greatness of the human spirit often shines brightest when the world is darkest.”
“All our efforts to avoid the difficulties of life lead us away from everything that is deeply satisfying.”
“You cannot live a meaningful life by filling your life with meaningless things.”
“Simply slowing down improves almost everything in our lives.”
“One of the great poverties of modern life is the enormous number of people with spiritual questions who do not know anyone to bring those questions to, who will take them seriously.”
Matthew Kelly - Life is Messy

​“Nobody wants to live to be 100 . . . except the guy who’s 99.”
Anonymous

​“You can come up with statistics to prove anything. Forty percent of all people know that!”
​Homer Simpson

“With gratitude, optimism becomes sustainable”.
Stephen Pollen

“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
G. Michael Hopf

“Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘nice doggie’ until you can find a rock.”
Will Rogers

“Egotism is the anesthetic that dulls the pain of stupidity.”
Frank Leahy

“I always wanted to sacrifice my life in one big way - and yet, God has required my sacrifice to be thousands of days over many years.”
Sally Clarkeson

“Well if he can’t dazzle people with his brilliance he can dazzle them with his BS”
​Newspaper Comments Thread

“Heavenly Father, I pray that I may live this day in your presence and please you more and more.
Lord Jesus, I pray that this day I may take up my cross and follow you.
Holy Spirit, I pray that this day you will fill me with yourself and cause your fruit to ripen in my life:
​love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”
Morning daily prayer of John Stott

“Although the woke people consider themselves to be in tune with the latest ideas, the belief systems they embrace are an amalgam of dead ideologies. Having very little sense of history, the woke don’t realize that the ideas they just discovered a few months ago have already been tried and failed. More often than not, they failed in spectacular ways—resulting in destitution, famine, and mass murder.”
William Kilpatrick

“The question of the meaning of death is also the question of the meaning of life. Death puts life into question. Death teaches both resolution and detachment; to care and not to care. To care resolutely for all that is important, and to detach from all that is unimportant.”
Peter Kreeft - Love is Stronger than Death

“If you lie to the government they’ll put you in prison, but when the government lies to you, it’s called being a politician.”
Tom MacDonald

“Some ideas are so stupid only an academic would believe them.”
​George Orwell.

“Public policy is increasingly driven by the assumption that feelings are the foundation of identity. The idea that our bodies ought to be fashioned according to our inner feelings is now widespread.”
​Carl Trueman

“A disguised spirit of misanthropy drives most 21st century movements – from the open borders and animal rights movements to post-humanism. Loyalty to nation, loyalty to family, and even loyalty to the human species are giving way to a sentimental fixation with an utterly abstract Other.”
​Jerry Salyer

“The human being creates three things which sets him apart from the animals; the tool, the image, and the grave.”
Hans Jonas

“I win battles with the dreams of my soldiers.”
Napoleon Bonaparte
​
“God justified you with His eyes wide open.”
J.I.Packer

“We all need something to do, someone to do it with, and something to look forward to.”
Dick Van Dyck

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered than answers that can’t be questioned.”
​Richard Feynman

“When you have to carry your own water, you learn the value of every drop.”
African Saying

“Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life and the long continuity of our institutions, and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island, or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed, and the life of the world may move forward into broad and sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister and long by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say ‘This was their finest hour’”.
​Winston Churchill

“Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king. He is an independent force in the world. ”
​Winston Churchill

“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”
 H. Richard Niebuhr

“Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the Lord shall be a light unto me.”
​Micah 7:8

“Worldly tears fall to the earth, but Godly tears are kept in a bottle.”
​Thomas Watson

“When an honest man discovers he is mistaken, he will either cease to be mistaken or cease to be honest.”
​Author Unknown
​
“I never could understand how it’s possible to love one’s neighbours. Perhaps if they weren’t so nigh. It’s possible to love abstractly, and occasionally from a distance, but hardly ever up close.”
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Advertising researchers have discovered that getting consumers to feel is twice as effective as getting them to think.”
Ronald L. Jelinek

“Why do you think it’s so important that we remember all the pronouns? I don’t want to be called “he” I want to be called ‘they’ or ‘them’. Who on earth can keep all of this in mind? The answer is; we can’t and we aren’t supposed to. We are supposed to be intimidated so that we don’t speak at all. We shut our mouths because in the confusion we don’t know what to say, or what pronouns to use. It’s an assault on freedoms, through language.”

Erwin Lutzer on the co-opting of words and language

“We don’t have a SKIN problem, we have a SIN problem. It’s common to the human race.”
Erwin Lutzer on critical race theory

​“Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go”
Joshua 1:9

“I’m never sure what I really think about something until I write about it.”
Rod Dreher

​“He who continually goes forth weeping, bearing seed for sowing, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.”
Psalm 126:6

“If it LOOKS like an ethics problem, it’s already an ethics problem.’
Newspaper commentary thread

“Our world has gone completely bonkers. We are living in a time of remarkable darkness and confusion. It is very important for us as followers of Lord Jesus, to see this.”
​Father Mark Goring

“We’ve all heard this before... ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help....’  What could possibly go wrong?”
Newspaper comments section

“Black soil is the home of all things green and godly. And that makes perfect sense. All that’s green and godly comes from the soil because God is a gardener. He was the first to wet his fingers with earth, the first to plant, the first to tamp and tend. When no one was watching, God was gardening.”
Pierce Taylor Hicks

“According to the official story, we try to harmonize scientific knowledge and opinion through education. But in reality, the work of reconciling science and public opinion is carried out through a kind of distributed demagogy, or Scientism.”
Matthew Crawford - How science has been corrupted

“We interpret and make sense of our lives through stories. We are more immediately and intuitively affected by narrative than by linear argument. This is not a glitch in our wiring, but a God-given expression of our humanity. If God is personal, as Scripture vouches that he is, our world is already a storied world.”
​Bruce Ashford

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a picture of a boot stamping on a face - FOREVER.”
George Orwell

​“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away.”
​Philip K. Dick

“The worth of a religion is not whether it makes you feel good, but whether it is true.”
C.S. Lewis

​“If there is a idiot in power; it is because those who elected him are well represented.”
Mahatma Gandhi

“It ought to be the oldest things, that are taught to the youngest people.”
G.K. Chesterton

“Probably the greatest tragedy of the church throughout its long and checkered history has been its constant tendency to conform to the prevailing culture instead of developing a Christian counter-culture .”
​John Stott

​“Our love grows soft if it is not strengthened by truth, and our truth grows hard if it is not softened by love.”
John Stott

“The state does not own the rights of its citizens. It’s an inversion of the relationship between citizen and government to think so. Citizens give orders to governments. Citizens are the ultimate rulers, which any definition of the word democracy will affirm.”
​Rex Murphy

“Our greatest fear should not be of failure, but of success in things that don’t really matter.”
​Francis Chan

Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.” 
Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)

“A ‘scientist’ who tries to shut down discussion is not a scientist.”
Newspaper commentary thread

“The body in fact, and only the body is capable of making visible that which is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. It has been created to transfer into the visible reality the mystery hidden from eternity in God, and thus to be a sign of it.”
​Pope John Paul II

“There are two qualities in particular that make sacred art worthy of veneration and so appropriate for use in prayer and worship. First the art must look like what it depicts. In other words there is no place for an abstract portrayal. Icons are like sacramentals; they predispose us to grace.”
​David Clayton (comments on Iconography)

“The temptation to disincarnate our humanity, and even more to disincarnate the Christian faith is constant and fierce. But ours is an enfleshed faith. Everything hinges on the Incarnation. We must be very careful not to un-flesh it. The person who opens himself up to life according to the Spirit, does not reject his body. It’s his body that becomes the very dwelling place of the Spirit.”
Christopher West

“How much tax people are willing to pay is a reasonable indicator of how much they think the state is worth.”
British economist Robert Skidelsky

“People say the only certain things in life are death and taxes. But there’s one more. There’s one certainty we can count on, come what may, in the days, years, and millennia ahead. It’s been around for over 2,000 years and it hasn’t waned yet. It’s the church.”
Jen Oshman

“Don’t fall into the mindset that downtime is wasted time. It is not. You will go further faster if you slow down and rest.”
​Tim Challies

“The demand for racism in Canada far outweighs the supply.”
​ -Newspaper comments thread

“Christians don’t believe in an afterlife, Jesus holds that there will be an event of far greater consequence and reality: resurrection.”
​Murray Campbell

“I know there is a lot of handwringing about how terrible social media is, but at the same time social media is one of the few places where you can also get the facts if you know how to use it. I don’t think traditional media has anything to brag about in terms of the quality of information they pass on to the public.”
Stephen Harper - 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

​6 STORIES
(1) Once all villagers decided to pray for rain. On the day of prayer all the people gathered, but only one boy came with an umbrella.
That’s FAITH.
(2) When you throw babies in the air, they laugh because they know you will catch them.
That’s TRUST.
(3) Every night we go to bed without any assurance of being alive the next morning, but still we set the alarms to wake up.
That’s HOPE.
(4) We plan big things for tomorrow in spite of zero knowledge of the future.
That’s CONFIDENCE.
(5) We see the world suffering, but still we get married and have children.
That’s LOVE.
(6) Written on an old man’s shirt, “I am not 77; I am sweet 16 with 61 years of experience.”
That’s ATTITUDE.
Live your life like the six stories.

“I may know all the doctrines of the Bible, but unless I know Christ, there is not one of them that can save me.”
Charles Spurgeon

​“Jesus came because there is something broken inside us that can only be, will only be fixed by his person, his presence, and his redeeming work.”
Paul David Tripp

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”
David Foster Wallace

“So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.”
George Monbiot

​“If I knew that tomorrow the world was going to fall apart, I would still plant my apple tree.”
Martin Luther

“There is a dangerous conflation of tolerance and inclusion with love. Real love means you are not going to tolerate a whole lot of things. Real love means you MUST exclude certain things.”’
​Bishop Robert Barron

“Deep change is rarely a matter of knowledge. It is a matter of repentance.”
Ed Welch

“The political left’s attempts to silence ideas they cannot, or will not, debate are a confession of intellectual bankruptcy.”
Thomas Sowell

​“We work at least in part to reproduce and enhance the beauty that God made in Creation. There are some things that God made that are simply made to be beautiful. This separates cultures. There are many cultures in the world that do not do things because of aesthetics. They don’t do things because of beauty. But we are made in the image of God. 

There are many cultures that just say fine, we have to get from this side of the river to that side of the river, how can we do it? Grab some rope, grab some vine, throw it across. Fine, we got to the other side. And then there are cultures that build bridges that are so beautiful, that you will travel one hundred miles out of your way, just to drive across them. 

When you see things that reflect the beauty of creation, you are seeing the result of the deep impact of the Gospel and a Biblical worldview, where we understand that there are some things that God created just because they are beautiful. And we go out of our way in order to reflect that beauty and to express that beauty. Design at its highest, reflects the glory and the grandeur of what God does in nature. These are Biblical concepts. This is what goodness also does for us. Because it’s good for us and good to us we cultivate it in such a way that we can continue to enjoy it.

Truth, beauty, and goodness. This is where ethics come from. There are things that are right, and there are things that are wrong, and there is a God who determines what things are right and wrong. No matter what you do, truth, beauty and goodness must guide all of your work. Do you see how all of this is connected? Why you can’t separate your salvation from the way you work with God’s creation? Do you see why we can’t go to work just to get a paycheque? Why we ought to have purpose every morning when we wake up? Why we ought to be grateful for strength in our limbs. For the opportunity to work. Grateful for the opportunity to express truth, beauty and goodness everywhere we go. 

​There is a God who created the world. We work because he works. When we work we pursue truth, beauty and goodness. As fallen men, we might not totally get that. But because of Christ who redeemed us, we are not only saved to have a right relationship with God, but we express that right relationship with God by pursuing truth, beauty and goodness to the glory or our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”
Voddie Baucham
​
“The successful life is the one that accounts seriously for its duties and that meets them with diligence. It is through the successive completion of little duties that we fulfill our big callings.”
​Tim Challies

“If man-made global warming is an existential threat to civilization, somebody needs to get China to start treating it as such. If not, there’s no need to. And either way, there’s no justification for our doing so while the CCP smirks and blasts past our thatched barn in a cloud of foul-smelling exhaust with a bumper sticker saying, ‘Thanks for Net Zero, You Useful Idiots.’”
John Robson, Epoch Times
​
“America has seen one of the most rapid de-Christianisations in the past two decades and the results so far are not good. What is left is not the rationalist paradise some naïve public philosophers were claiming at the start of the 21st century, but a sort of distilled Christianity, which without the supernatural elements is far less rational: and so what results is endless moral panics, a world seen in stark black and white between good and evil, competitive sanctimony and the sentimental glorification of victimhood in which everyone wants the glory of being on the Cross.”
Ed West in UnHerd - How God created the West

“Biblical justice is not the same as social justice. Why does this matter? It matters because God demands justice. It matters because injustice is sin. And if social justice is truly justice, then anything that does not align with it is sin, and this is why the term ‘social justice’ is problematic, and why so many of us fall prey to it.

Social justice is state redistribution of wealth on the level of society. It is a group concern, and it does not matter what the individuals in this group believe. It is not a heart issue. But from the Biblical perspective, justice is a heart issue and a law of God issue. It is about individuals following the laws of God. That is Biblical justice. It’s a very important distinction.

​Is there racism? Of course there is. Is there injustice? Of course there is. But this is the problem as I see it. As we go down this road of a social justice mentality, we are going down a road that Christians cannot go down very long, and it is distracting us from things that are very real, and need to be addressed, and cannot be addressed properly from that worldview. Remember, we walk by the flesh but we do not wage war according to the flesh. The weapons of our warfare are more powerful than anything we could possibly comprehend. They are enough. What we are witnessing is catastrophic. But it will not defeat God’s church. As we engage, let us recognize the power and significance of our weaponry.

So what do we do?  We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God. We take captive every thought to obey Christ. We have to go to war against these ideologies. We have to identify them, and we have to identify the danger that they pose, and we have to dismantle them. Physically, we are all one race, the race of Adam. There are multiple ethnicities, but there is one human race.
​
Critical theory, critical race theory, intersectionality, these things are Satanic, and antithetical to Biblical truth, so we must come against these arguments. This is about us developing a Biblical worldview. We know there are things that are wrong that need to be made right, but we don’t have a well developed theology. We have to take those thoughts captive instead of simply parroting ideas from the culture, and falling prey to every wind of doctrine that comes our way. This is how we engage on these topics, to realize that we are in the midst of a battle, and to realize that this battle is a spiritual one.”
Voddie Baucham

“The promised land, is life as God intended it. A real God steps in and says, you are fearfully and wonderfully made and I died for you. You are not a victim.”
Pastor Alton Hardy

​“For Biblical people, the body can never be construed as a prison for the soul, nor as an object for the soul’s manipulation. Moreover, the mind or will is not the “true self” standing over and against the body; rather, the body, with its distinctive form, intelligibility, and finality, is an essential constituent of the true self.”
​Bishop Robert Barron

“If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“Christianity makes this remarkable claim, that Christ the divine scapegoat, takes the sins of the world upon himself. What identity politics does is to retain the idea of original sin, and the scapegoat, but instead of finding a divine resolution, it finds a worldly one.
Social justice is the project of establishing who owes what to whom. This is the essence of identity politics. The purpose is not to resolve matters, but to call out groups and establish your debt and innocence points. To be innocent we must specify our distance from the prime transgressor who is for the moment, the white heterosexual male.
​There is a theodicy being offered up here that is a deep perversion of Christianity. To move from philanthropy to social justice is to completely misunderstand the idea of gifts. In our contemporary world, moral cleanliness and purity is not purchased by Christ on the Cross, but by scapegoating another human group now said to be responsible for the sins of the world. There remains no more grace, only punishment. There is no mercy to pass on to others because it was divinely extended to us. Equity, by which we really mean retribution, is the order of the day.”
Joshua Mitchell

“Repentance, not utopia, is the greatest revolutionary force in the world.”
Max Scheler

​“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”
​G.K. Chesterton

“Suffering people need a golden dream, something to live for. A conception of hope. You can’t simply be against everything bad. You have to be for something good.” 
Alexandre Baroznikov

​“In both pre-Bolshevik Russian and pre-Nazi Germany, elites revelled in acts of rebellion that made fun of traditions and standards, moral and otherwise. They immersed themselves in baseness and called it liberation. They also took pleasure in overturning institutions and established practises for the sake of benefiting outsiders. The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price - the destruction of civilization - for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past, forced their way into it.”
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.”
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

“The highest things in life are useless, because they are done for their own sake.”
Bishop Robert Barron

​“Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions.”
G.K. Chesterton
​
“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!”
Isaiah 5:20
​
“For the vision is yet for an appointed time; but at the end it will speak, and it will not lie.
Though it tarries, wait for it; because it will surely come, It will not tarry.”
​Habakkuk 2:3

“Christianity is the one myth that is true”.
J.R. Tolkien

​“Love, as Dostoevsky put it, is harsh and dreadful. It means not living in a safe space. It means giving one’s life away with a kind of reckless abandon. Unless the seed falls down and dies, it remains a “safe space” but if it falls to the ground and dies, it bears much fruit. We are not meant for safe spaces, we are meant for spiritual adventure.”
Bishop Robert Barron

“I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.”
Jeremiah 31:34

“The closer I get to nature, the further I get from idiots”.
Buddy Brown​

​“One thing that addiction does, it freezes you. You don’t develop, you don’t learn the skills by trial and error of having experiences and learning from them and finding out what it is you want and how to go about getting it, by relating to other people. You short-circuit all of that stuff and just go for the button that says ‘this feels good’ over and over again. It’s been my experience that drugs are just a waste of time, I mean they are just dead time. Gone. There is nothing to be learned from them.”
James Taylor

“Not I but Christ in me. The preacher really needs to disappear behind the Word. Only God can make that happen. I have experienced again and again in my preaching life that the Word takes over because the Word has its own inherent power… I’m saddened that so many people who preach don’t seem to understand that the Word has a power in and of itself that can seize the preacher and make the preacher an instrument.”
​Fleming Rutledge

“Creative people are especially observant, and they value accurate observation (telling themselves the truth) more than other people do. They see things as others do, but also as others do not. ”
David Ogilvy

“We follow the words of Jesus not because they are the words of Jesus, but because following them make us fully human. ”
Jason Micheli

​“Take as your aim the task of ever closing the gap between intention and follow-through. 
Make it your end to convert potential energy into kinetic.”
Brett McKay
​
“When the sun goes below the horizon, he is not set; the heavens glow for a full hour after his departure.
And when a great and good man sets, the sky of this world is luminous, long after he is out of sight.
​Such a man cannot die out of this world. When he goes he leaves behind much of himself. Though dead, he speaks.”
Henry Ward Beecher

“We both believe and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble.”
Emily Dickinson

“No man knows how bad he is until he tries hard to be good.”
C.S. Lewis

“I believe Christianity today is the scapegoat for absolutely fundamental reasons - because it says something about humanity that people don’t want to believe, that sounds impossible. It destroys our pride.”
René Girard

“If we read the stories of men and women who changed the course of history, perhaps we can figure out how it is done.”
Dr. Frank A. James III

“Welcome to Canada, “the greatest hotel on earth.”
​Yann Martel

“Popular responsible government, our tradition of individual freedom, our incorruptible law courts, the useful and often beautiful English language, the bonds of the Commonwealth and our beloved monarchy. To protect them, we must understand them”.
Richard S. Lambert - The Great Heritage

“We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did - not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours.”
John of Salisbury

“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go! ”
Oliver Cromwell addressing the Rump Parliament, 1653 from Thomas Salmon in his Chronological History of London
​
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
​Mark Twain

“Some might be tempted, in reading of the miraculous healings performed by Jesus, to interpret his actions as primarily displays of power and divinity—as if the sick and possessed were props conveniently providing a way for Jesus to say, in essence, “You doubt that I am God, do you? Watch this!” But the power of Christ over sin and death is never separate from the mercy of Christ toward those who suffer from sin and the inevitability of death.”
Carl E. Olson

​“Unless you love truth, you cannot KNOW truth”
​Blaise Pascal

“We must hold onto two themes in Scripture - atonement by substitution and Christus Victor. If we get those out of balance, we do violence to Scripture itself.”
Fleming Rutledge


“You (North) Americans are so gullible. No, you won’t accept Communism outright; but we’ll keep feeding you small doses of Socialism until you will finally wake up and find that you already have Communism. We won’t have to fight you... you (will) fall like overripe fruit into our hands.”
Nikita Khrushchev  (1960)

“Most people don’t understand that scientific statements must always be challenged. Consensus does not mean something is true. If someone calls you out for questioning, you are dealing with an ideology, not science.”
Zuzana Janosova Den Boer

“Hand in hand with your Maker, anything is possible.”
Jodi Stancil

“ If we do not initiate the boys, they will burn the village down.”
African Proberb

“The best thing about the future is that it comes one day at a time”
Abraham Lincoln

“Stories tell us how to think and what to do. They teach us what to love, what to fear, what to hope for and whom to trust. Stories reveal to us how we differ from others and how we are the same. They tell us where we came from, where we stand, and where we are going.”
​Rod Dreher

“We are moving toward a dictatorsip of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one’s own ego and one’s own desires. The church needs to withstand the tide of trends and the latest novelties.”
Pope Benedict XVI

​“Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession...Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God’s wrath, I came to think I would have to rebel against a god who wasn’t wrathful at the sight of the world’s evil. God isn’t wrathful in spite of being love, God is wrathful because God IS love.”
Miroslav Volf

“A corporation in the 1960’s felt it had responsibilities to the city, the state, the country and the individual. All of that is largely gone. The Milton Friedman school of thought has a lot to answer for. The idea that the only responsibility of a corporation is to maximize profits is a terrible business formula, and a shockingly amoral way to run anything. If you say as an individual, my only interest is to maximize my advantage, you are a sociopath.”
Jeremy Grantham

One of my Mother’s favourite poems:
‘Twas battered and scarred, and the auctioneer thought it sacredly worth his while
To waste much time on the old violin, but held it up with a smile:
“What am I bidden, good folks,” he cried, “Who’ll start the bidding for me?”
“A dollar, a dollar”; then “Two!” “Only two? Two dollars, and who’ll make it three?
Three dollars, once; three dollars, twice; going for three…..” But no,
From the back of the room, a gray-haired man came forward and picked up the bow;
Then, wiping the dust from the old violin, and tightening up the strings
He played a melody pure and sweet as a caroling angel sings.
The music ceased, and the auctioneer, with a voice that was quiet and low,
Said: “What am I bid for the old violin?” and he held it up with the bow.
“A thousand dollars, and who’ll make it two? Two thousand! And who’ll make it three?
Three thousand, once, three thousand, twice, And going, and gone,” said he.
The people cheered, but some of them cried, we do not quite understand
What changed its worth.” Swift came the reply: “The touch of a master’s hand.”
And many a man with life out of tune, and battered and scarred with sin,
Is auctioned cheap to the thoughtless crowd, much like the old violin.
A “mess of pottage,” a glass of wine; a game–and he travels on.
He is “going once, and “going” twice, he’s “going” and almost “gone.”
But the Master comes, and the foolish crowd never can quite understand
The worth of a soul and the change that is wrought
By the touch of the Master’s hand.

Myra Brooks Welch​


“All Woolworth’s were special and they all had the same smell. They smelled a little bit like popcorn and chewing gum all rubbed around on the sole of an old leather shoe.”
Nancy Griffith

“It is a false exegesis to use the word of God to promote migration. It is better to help people flourish in their culture than to encourage them to come to a Europe in full decadence.”
Cardinal Robert Sarah

​“The experience of death is going to get more and more painful, contrary to what many people believe. The forthcoming euthanasia will put the emphasis on personal decision in a way which was blissfully alien to the whole problem of dying in former times. It will make death even more subjectively intolerable, for people will feel responsible for their own deaths and morally obligated to rid their relatives of their unwanted presence. Euthanasia will further intensify all the problems its advocates think it will solve.”
René Girard

“We are aware that globalization doesn’t mean global friendship but global competition and, therefore, conflict.”
René Girard
​
“Victimism uses the ideology of concern for victims to gain political or economic or spiritual power. When the AntiChrist comes, he will come as someone who is more Christian than Christ.”
René Girard”

“Live your life in such a way that makes no sense unless God exists”
Cardinal Souhard

​“Religion is a calling to heroism. Grace always calls you to something. The Church is not telling people enough about how to nobly contend with suffering and malevolence.”
Bishop Robert Barron

“A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others.”
​Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“For most pre-modern people, the idea of liberty would have been limited by moral rightness... freedom to sin would have been incomprehensible - a contradiction on terms.”
​Scott Hahn

“peace is not merely the absence of conflict but the presence of justice.”
Martin Luther King

​“If all the swords in England were pointed at my head, your threats would not move me. I am ready to die for my Lord, that in my blood the Church may obtain liberty and peace.”
Thomas Becket, Martyr
​
“If God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it.”
Roadside Church Sign
​
“Building things is a good antidote for perfectionism because it forces you to deal with imperfection.”
Steve Maxwell

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.”
​Mark Twain

​“The idea of family is not human but divine. It is not primarily biological or sociological, but theological.”
Dr. Scott Hahn

“He who truly knows, has no reason to shout.”
Leonardo Da Vinci

​“If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter”
Blaise Pascall

​“We walked through this year together with dignity, as befits a single nation which honours the tradition of its ancestors. These values - courage, compassion and graciousness - are in our hearts and blood and show in our deeds. ”
​Russian New Years Address

“The Western account clarifies that justice is what we are fitted for. What is due to all human beings is beyond all bargains and without an alternative. For those of us who are Christians, the perfect living out of that justice is unfolded in the Gospels.”
​George Grant

“There are an infinite number of ways to make mistakes, but far fewer ways to do things right. ”
Steve Maxwell

“I have only ever experienced cabin fever in cities, never in a cabin.”
Elisabeth Wiklander - A Cabin and 50 Acres​ website

“Philosophy is very often a man’s way of explaining his own ‘I LIKE’”.
​Jack London

“If you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”
Marilyn Monroe

“What happens to me today is not as important as what I do about it.”
Japanese reflection

​Naikan daily reflections: a Japanese Philosphy of three questions
1) What have I received today? 2) What have I given today?
3) What troubles have I caused someone else today?

NORSEMAN’S CODE
Love what you do
Do what you love
Begin where you are
Use what you have
Honour the elders
Teach the Young
Protect and love your family
Keep your craft and your skills strong
Learn from your own mistakes
Be loyal to your friends
Voice your opinion
Stand your ground
Work hard, stay humble
Focus on details
Be brave
Be Calm
Be patient
Wake early
Temper your body
Walk in the woods
Climb some mountains
Find time to be alone
Rest when you can
Work when you must
Take charge where others show weakness
Have more spend less
More time, less convenience
Craft, not business
Value not price
Quality not quantity
To create, not to produce


“If you build an army of 100 lions and their leader is a dog, in any fight the lions will die like a dog. But if you build an army of 100 dogs and their leader is a lion, the dogs will fight like a lion.”
Napoleon Bonaparte

“if you say it loud enough and often enough, people will like totally believe it.”
​Liberal Minister Catherine McKenna

“Christ declared war against our enemy, crushed him who at the beginning had taken us captive in Adam, and trampled on his head, so that he might destroy sin, overcome death, and give life to man.”
Saint Irenaeus

“We are now standing in the face of the greatest historical confrontation humanity has gone through. We are now facing the final confrontation between the Church and the anti-Church, of the Gospel versus the anti-Gospel. It is a test of 2,000 years of culture and Christian civilization with all of its consequences for human dignity, individual rights, human rights and the rights of nations.”
Pope John Paul II

“Journalism is very much corrupted. It is not the media in the middle anymore. Now it is a part of the game that it claims to be covering. Journalism is one of the failing institutions within society.”
Rex Murphy

“Food, energy, housing, employment. Do the first things first. Then if you have elaborate projects or global causes, great. The basic things have to be dealt with basically.”
Rex Murphy

“2020 was the year identity politics prevailed — just not for all identities.”
​quote from Financial Post

Overheard in conversation: “If it wasn’t for caffeine, I wouldn’t have any personality at all!”

“When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty”
​Thomas Jefferson

“Stop just BEING. Start becoming.”
Brett MacKay

​“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.”
John Muir
​
“It is not enough to win a war; it is more important to organize the peace.”
Aristotle

“How does a child spell love? T-I-M-E.”
Conor Neill
​
“Writing is thinking. When you try to lay out your ideas in a structured order that others can digest, and you realize you can’t, I suggest the thinking was weak. Writing IS thinking. Staring out the window philosophizing is not structured thinking.” 
Connor Neill

“Achievement that costs us is worth celebrating. Many things that I have made cause me to rejoice for the privilege of making them. Mostly they are things from wood, but sometimes too a building, a garden dug or a repair made. I think we are often proud in the right way.”
Paul Sellers, Master Woodworker

“This country is so race-conscious, so ate-up with colours and pigments. I call it ‘skin hang-ups’. It's a disease.”
​Charley Pride (country singer who first broke through race barriers)

Pondering Christmas past... my mom used to tell us how they would be in wonder if they got an orange at Christmas time. In the middle of the prairies in those days, oranges were a rare treat. Something to think about midst today’s abundance of everything. It puts the word “grateful” in context. 

“Our lives are eschatologically stretched between a sneak preview of the new world being born among us in the Church, and the old world where the principalities and powers are reluctant to give way. In the meantime, which is the only time the Church has ever known, we live as those who know something about the fate of the world that the world does not yet know. And that makes us different. 
​Will Willimon

“Waiting is a spiritual practice, isn’t it? It’s a chance to sit in the void of our present reality, awed at the emptiness we feel, and decide how we will fill it. Isaiah says that ‘At night I long for you with my whole being. My spirit within me watches for you.’”
​Teer Hardy

“Joy, Christian joy, is the joy of knowing what awaits us even in death. And that joy gives us the strength to pray without ceasing and the courage to give thanks for a gift we simply do not deserve. We have a joy to express and to share because God is coming again, bursting onto the scene like our favorite uncle with a salami under one arm and a bottle of wine under the other with no other hope in the world other than to party (read: rejoice) forever and ever. This is the Good News.”
​Teer Hardy

“This is one of the many unique aspects of the Psalter, that are are always two voices speaking at the same time. If you believe as many do, that Jesus speaks through the Psalms, that the prayers represent the voice of Jesus himself, then you may say that Jesus speaks directly to us through the Psalter as God, and we speak back to him. You can carry that with you forever. You speak to God because God has spoken to you and in the Psalms, this dynamic is going on from beginning to end. ”
Fleming Rutledge, on the Psalms

“Poor and marginalized people all over the globe do not have the liesure to sit around watching television shows discussing injustice, they know about it firsthand. Therefore, the good news that God is just, means a great deal to them. It’s comfortable middle class Christians who are not much interested in hearing about the righteous judgement of God.”
Fleming Rutledge

“If you want to know what went on in the mind of Jesus, read the Old Testament. We tend to forget that what we call the Old Testament was the only Bible Jesus had.”
​Fleming Rutledge

“God grants what he commands”.
Saint Augustine

​“There are children in the world so hungry that God can only appear to them in the form of  bread” -- Mennonite Reflection

“You never know who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out.” —Warren Buffett

“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.” —Marcus Aurelius

Prayer of an Aging Man:
Lord, You know better than myself that I am growing older and will soon be old. Keep me from becoming too talkative, and especially from the unfortunate habit of thinking that I must say something on every subject and at every opportunity.
Release me from the idea that I must straighten out other peoples' affairs. With my immense treasure of experience and wisdom, it seems a pity not to let everybody partake of it. But You know, Lord, that in the end I will need a few friends.
Keep me from the recital of endless details; give me wings to get to the point.
Grant me the patience to listen to the complaints of others; help me to endure them with charity. But seal my lips on my own aches and pains -- they increase with the increasing years and my inclination to recount them is also increasing.
I will not ask You for improved memory, only for a little more humility and less self-assurance when my own memory doesn't agree with that of others. Teach me the glorious lesson that occasionally I may be wrong.
Keep me reasonably gentle. I do not have the ambition to become a saint -- it is so hard to live with some of them -- but a harsh old person is one of the devil's masterpieces.
Make me sympathetic without being sentimental, helpful but not bossy. Let me discover merits where I had not expected them, and talents in people whom I had not thought to possess any. And, Lord, give me the grace to tell them so.

“We are part of a great and heroic adventure, in which we have a duty to take part. Remembrance day is YOUR story. You are not the audience, you are the cast.”
John Robson, on commemorating Remembrance Day

“Better a good blade on a bad tool than an inferior blade on a good tool”
Trevor Toop

“Conservativism shares a problem with Christianity. People don’t believe in conservatives because they rarely see a real one, while false substitutes abound”
​Trevor Toop

“Scout’ used to mean the one on watch for the rest. We have widened the word a little. We have made it fit the town as well as the wilderness and suited it to peace time instead of war. We have made the scout an expert in Life-craft as well as Wood-craft, for he is trained in the things of the heart as well as head and hand. Scouting we have made to cover riding, swimming, tramping, trailing, photography, first aid, camping, handicraft, loyalty, obedience, courtesy, thrift, courage, and kindness.”
Boy Scouts Handbook

“Humans like starting new things much more than taking care of older things. This is true on both an institutional and individual level: it’s more exciting to build a new road than to maintain it; more exciting to lose weight than to keep it off. There’s plenty of short-term pleasure and intrinsic motivation when it comes to pursuing something novel, but the effort to keep up unsexy maintenance on what we’ve already got takes real intent. ”
Brett Mckay
​
“There will always be that simplicity that people need because the world is so complicated. I think that country music simplifies that simplicity and we’re always going to need that, the crazier the whole world gets.”
​Dolly Parton

“The road of life is paved with flat squirrels who couldn’t make decisions.”
Anonymous 

“There is no such thing as a perfect shop, but we are all quite capable of making a shop which is perfect for us.”
Mike Pekovich

​“Never judge a target by the arrows that miss the bullseye.”
Steve Maxwell

“We all need patterns in our lives because that is what establishes our character. When we talk to our children, raise them up, give them good values, we set out patterns for all that we do.”
Woodworker, Paul Sellers 

“The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise,
nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill;
But time and chance happen to them all.”
Ecclesiastes 9:11 King James Version

“Many people use art, only a few receive it.”
​CS Lewis

“We do not want merely to see beauty, we want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves.”
​​CS Lewis

“Storytellers keep sowing, keep talking; peristent in making something out of nothing but words, all in the faith that someone will listen, that someone out there is dying to hear your story and make it their own. ”
Will Willimon

​“The child is father to the man.” – William Wordsworth​

​“I come into the peace of wild things, who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water, and I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their llight. 
For a time, I rest in the grace of the world and I am free.”
Wendell Berry

“I rise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”
E. B. White

“Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.”
Mark Twain

“One of the most time-consuming things is to have an enemy.”
E. B. White

“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”
C. S. Lewis
​
“All that we are is story. It is what we arrive with. It is all we leave behind. We are not the things we accumulate. We are not the things we deem important. We are story. What comes to matter then is the creation of the best possible story we can while we’re here; you, me, us, together. When we can do that and we take the time to share those stories with each other, we get bigger inside, we see each other, we recognize our kinship – we change the world, one story at a time…”
Richard Wagamese

“It is a tragedy, perhaps, that human beings can get so much energy and enthusiasm from hate. If you want to feel ten feet tall and as though you could run a hundred miles without stopping, hate beats pure cocaine any day. Hitler resurrected a beaten, bankrupt, half-starved nation with hatred and nothing more. Imagine that.”
Kurt Vonnegut

​“By three methods we learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the most bitter.”
Confucious

“Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and though we are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are one equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
Alfred Tennyson
​
​“Let it be known that we claim our lawful rights to live as free people away from government corporation under the highest law of the land there is… common law. Common law is what guarantees us the ability to correct injustices.”
Ann Bessington

​“When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain.”
William Shakespeare

“In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.”
Thomas Mann
​
“A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see what is above.”
C. S. Lewis

“ Because my parents were sent to a residential school and never developed parenting skills, they couldn’t offer the nurturing and protection I needed. I was in that foster home because someone had fractured the bonds that tied me to tradition and culture, and language and spirituality. I became one of the lost ones, one of the disappeared ones... Somewhere out there right now, is an Indian kid like I was, wandering around somebody else’s Bobsey Twins neighbourhood wondering why he is there and who he is. Somewhere out there is the Indian kid looking for the smile that will make all the clouds go away. He’s our responsibility, all of us.”
Richard Wagamese

“Society appears to have little defense against the abyss of human decadence.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“A ship in port is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.”
Grace Hopper

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
​Fréderic Bastiat

“The happiest, most stable and satisfied people I know all pursue some kind of craftsmanship seriously. Besides being useful, making things is a solid anchor for many of us. The craftsmanship that sustains comes from a belief that human beings were made for a better world than we find ourselves in. There’s such a thing as absolute right and wrong, there is such a thing as good work and bad work, and there’s such a thing as absolute beauty. When I build things with craftsmanship in mind, I’m aiming to bring one tiny part of my world into better alignment with the perfect world of beauty, peace and permanence that I feel drawn towards. In 30+ years of working with my hands, I’ve found nothing more sustaining than this one goal – to work towards the kind of ideal world of beauty and quality I wish I lived in all the time.”
​Steve Maxwell 

“It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.”
Thomas Sowell

“Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas, in that order.” 
Patrick Winston

​“...Your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”
​Walt Whitman

​“We don’t have all the answers. I got to save some of the answers for somebody else to do”
Richard Overton 112 year old man when asked about going to church

A political science observation about government:
“Fish rots from the head.”

​“A man’s got to have a code, a creed to live by, no matter his job.”
John Wayne

“If unwilling to rise in the morning, say to thyself, ‘I awake to do the work of a man.’”
​Marcus Aurelius

“Real manhood is different from simple anatomical maleness. It is not a natural condition that comes about spontaneously through biological maturation but rather is a precarious or artificial state that boys must win against powerful odds.”
David Gilmore

​“Values don’t become virtues until they are tested.”
Brett McKay

​“Skills are learned, they’re the fruits of struggle.”
Steve Maxwell

​“All trades have their origin in the domestic and their corruption in the state.”
Cormac McCarthy (The Stone Mason)

​“As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.”
Proverbs 27:17

“There is one thing for which we will fight—the tombs of our forefathers.  Find these tombs, and try to wreck them, and you will soon know whether we are willing to stand up to you.”
Scythians to King Darius of the Persians

“A crowd is not a court, and a mob has no conscience.”
Rex Murphy National Post News

“The good man, though a slave, is free. The wicked... is a slave of as many masters as he has vices”.
Saint Augustine of Hippo (City of God)

“Not ‘to have, but ‘to be”
Charles Alexander Eastman

​“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”
Leo Tolstoy

“If you could get past the glitter, you might conclude that the Trudeau government is like a sexy sports car with lousy mechanics. A lot of vroom-vroom, but a history of breakdowns and expensive repairs. ”
Kelly McParland, National Post News

​“Common sense is not so common. If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.”
Voltaire ​

“Life is a missing puzzle piece that you have to find every single day.”
Trevor Toop

“...the feeling of self-righteousness... is commonly confused with religion”
Christopher Lasch – Revolt of the Elites

“The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists.”
G. K. Chesterton

“He who fears being conquered is sure of defeat.”
Napoleon Bonaparte
​
“Your own voice is the voice that carries you through life the best.”
Nanci Griffith

​“The little things in your mind and heart are the places where the battle for joy and sanity are won or lost”
Steve Maxwell

​“Beware of the dog OWNER”
Old Portuguese saying compliments of my friend and neighbour Ed

“Success doesn’t always feel like success when you’re in the middle of succeeding.”
Steve Maxwell

“It is good that our children fear dragons, for in their fearing, they can learn to overcome evil with courage”.
Michael D. O’Brien

“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” 
​Mark Twain

“Millions long for immortality, who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon”
​Susan Ertz

“The worse, the society, the more law there will be. In Hell there will be NOTHING but law, and due process will be meticulously observed”
Grant Gilmore

“Be yourself” is about the worst advice you could give some poeple.
Tom Masson

Asked whether he was filled with the Spirit, Dwight L Moody replied... “yes, but I leak.”

“Enthusiasm is the enemy of patience and care. Always temper your enthusiasm for enthusiasm.”
​Steve Maxwell

​“I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my lyfe, ere many yeares I will cause a boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scripture, than he doust.” William Tyndale

​ “The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.”
John Ruskin

“A garden of course, is not just nature. It is nature, plus culture”. 
Andy Crouch

​“Beautiful things are created by people who both lament and hope.”
Andy Crouch

​“Anxiety, is imagining the future without  Jesus in it.”
Andy Crouch

“God doth not need either man’s work or his own gifts;
who best bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state is kingly.
Thousands at his bidding speed and post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”
John Milton

“The Society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.” 
John W. Gardner

“There are two ways to live your life - one is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
Albert Einstein

​“Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live; and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.”
Mother Ann Lee of the Shakers.

​IN PRAISE OF WOOD
There’s something so satisfying in the feel of wood
It smells so fragrant
It’s so beautiful, so honest and so good. 
Just ask the ones who work with it. They’re a special breed of men. 
They’re mostly quiet people, gentle, but they’re strong. 
Just talk to them, the ones who’ve known it long. 
If you are lucky, one may tell you how he feels
About a simple piece of wood, that he with skill
and patience has turned into something of beauty, long to last
And hold a little of himself from out of the past. 
You can’t stay angry when you work with wood
There’s something magic happens, and you find
Disturbing thoughts have left your mind
I can’t explain it, it just happens so.
There was a Man who worked with wood
And could it be the deathless love that radiated and shone from Him 
Has permeated and blessed all wood?
Perhaps a little of this love comes off on us
And this is what we feel?
I think it could. 

Helen Glaister Dobson, August 1966, Shelburne, Ontario

“There is no wealth but life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest numbers of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest, who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others.”
John Ruskin, Unto This Last

“I don't believe in magic.’ The young boy said.
The old man smiled. ‘You will when you see her.”
Atticus Poetry

“Reading is the one thing you can do alone, that makes you feel less alone.”
Will Schwalbe

​“We never started off at the beginning of the summer expecting trouble or exciting things - at least not after the first couple of years. Then, I think we were looking for adventures. Later on when we found out what adventures were like, we tried to avoid them but they came anyway. So after that, except for “exercising due care” as the explorers said, we neither anticipated them, nor tried to avoid them. We just accepted them as part of the increasing number of miles we logged every summer.”
M. Wylie Blanchet, The Curve of Time 

“It’s easy to imagine that wilderness survival would involve equipment, training and experience. It turns out that at the moment of truth, those might be good things to have but they aren’t decisive..... The maddening thing for someone of a Western scientific turn of mind is that it’s not what’s IN your pack that separates the quick from the dead. It’s not even what’s in your mind. Corny as it sounds, it’s what’s in your heart.”
​Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival

“To survive, you must first be annealed in the fires of peril.”
Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival

“I was chasing my father, trying to get some of that righteous stuff he had. What else does a son do but try to learn from his father?”
​Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival

“The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.”
Søren Kierkegaard

“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.”
Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

“People understand me so poorly that they don't even understand my complaint about them not understanding me.”
Søren Kierkegaard, The Journals

“I don’t understand people who admire upwards and kick downwards.”
Amy Laura Hall

“My arms are too short to box with God...”
Johnny Cash

​“If I had a choice between endless searching while protesting I am atheist, OR endless searching while protesting faith, I would still choose faith every single time. ”
Trevor Toop

​“Sometimes you need to cross the line to find the line...”
author unknown.

​Nine fruits of the spirit (as set out in the book of Galatians)...
love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control.
Character traits of a mature Christian: wisdom, understanding, counsel, strength, courage, and personal holiness.

“Faith is an assent of the intellect to truths of revelation, by a command of the will, through grace. ”
Father Howard Blightner

“The reason to discuss ideas is so that your ideas can die, instead of you.”
Karl Popper
​ 
“Your religion is your witness, in the shape your love takes.”
David Dark

“Jesus Christ did not come into the world to make bad people good, he came to make dead people come to life.”
Overheard by TV preacher

“I have never understood so clearly before, what preaching is to me. Basically it is to proclaim a mystery before which, before whom even our most exalted ideas turn to straw. It is also to proclaim this mystery with a passion that ideas alone have little to do with. It is to try to put the Gospel into words not the way you would compass an essay, not the way you would write a poem or a love letter - putting your heart into it, your own excitement, most of all your own life. It is to speak words that you hope may, by grace, be bearers not simply of new understanding, but of new life, both for the ones you are speaking to and also for you.”
Frederick Buechener

Snippets of thought by Anne Lamotte...
Earth is forgiveness school.
laughter is carbonated holiness.
Grace always bats last. 
a good name for God is NOT ME.
G-O-D is really, the gift of desperation.
The Secret of life is to GO OUTSIDE AND LOOK UP.
Human beings are a mixed grill of happy anticipation and dread.
Everything will work better if you unplug it for ten minutes including you.
The secret of life is just showing up and keeping your butt in the chair.
Every single thing in life that happens to you is yours and you get to tell it.

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
Oscar Wilde

“To me a fight is not a fight until there is resistance. Something to overcome. Otherwise it’s just an athletic venture, an exhibition. I think life is like that. I don’t think a lawyer is a lawyer until there is something to overcome in the courtroom… Everything goes wrong and he is eff’d so to speak, and then he still handles it. A doctor is not a doctor until he opens up this kid, just like he’s got at home. Arteries are bleeding all over the place, and it’s not in the textbook. And he’s gotta figure it out. Then he’s a doctor. I equate life to a fight. There is not a fight until there is pressure. Resistance. Overcoming something.”
Teddy Atlas

​“The world’s not fair sometimes. Maybe sometimes you feel like you haven’t been treated fair. Like you haven’t been given as good a hand of cards as the guy down the street was. On one given night, you can get in the ring. If you trained hard enough, if you cared enough, if you were determined enough, if you were driven enough, if you were prepared enough… On one given night. No matter where you came from, no matter who your parents are, no matter your ethnicity, your religion, anything… on that one given night you could make a choice to be the best. You, despite everything that happened up to that point, could have your hand risen, as the best. As the champion of the world, where everything is fair and right, on that one given night. That’s boxing.”
Teddy Atlas

“Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.”
Saint Augustine

“Everyone suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Your choices don’t have to make sense to someone else, just to you.”
Gary Rogowski

​“No artist is pleased... there is no satisfaction whatever, at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
Gary Rogowski

“The problem at the bench is always me. I forget why I am here in the first place. It is not to be building things, although that is grand. It is not to be learning a skill, which is also a great blessing. It is not to become familiar with a rich tradition of making, a broad history of craftsmanship that stretches back for centuries, to be part of a long progression of design and technical achievements. These are all very good, but none of these are the main reason I am here. I am here at the bench to be quiet with myself.”
Gary Rogowski

“Patience is also a form of action”
​Auguste Rodin

“Those in the apocalyptic school of biblical interpretation, if you want to call it that, share a common commitment to a worldview, which Jesus apparently had, in which there are three active agencies - God, human beings, and the Enemy. Most preachers in the mainline talk as if there are only two agents - God and human beings. In parts of the conservative evangelical world, the Enemy is construed in a rather simplistic way, often having very little to do with world movements but only with individual human temptation. Jesus comes knowing the entire world is in the grip of a demonic power, an enemy of God’s purposes. He knows that this Enemy will oppose him at every turn. He knows he will have to come to an apocalyptic confrontation with this Enemy, that he will have to grapple with it, suffer from it, die under its power, and then conquer it... The love of God cannot be defeated. That’s what we see in the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. If you just have the Resurrection, then you have no sense of anything being defeated. You have no sense of Jesus having taken anything on. In the Crucifixion, Jesus has taken on everything satanic, everything evil, everything demonic, everything sinful, everything wrong. In the Resurrection we see that he has been vindicated and that his victory is complete.”
Fleming Rutledge

​“Without the resurrection, we would never have heard of Jesus. A crucified man was a nothing, a nobody. They were thrown away and their history forgotten. We don’t know the name of anybody who was crucified, prior to Jesus.”
​Fleming Rutledge

“Man’s power to make himself what he pleases, really means the power of some men, to make of other men what they please.”
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

“The absolute ruler almost always attempts to destroy diversity. He cannot rest content with a passive populace. As he extends his grasp into more and more aspects of human life, he becomes hostile to everything outside of his own will. As his own power becomes more absolute, it becomes increasingly negative, because by its very nature, it must oppose what cannot be extinguished in the human person. It must seek at some point, to destroy the inner impulse to genuine creativity, which depends for its wellbeing on freedom from manipulation.”
Michael D. O’Brien, The Family and the New Totalitarianism.  

“Of all the ‘I AM’ declarations found in the book of John, the last is most profound. When the Centurions and Temple Guard come to arrest Jesus in the Garden, he asks, ‘Whom are you seeking?’ They reply, ‘Jesus of Nazareth’. Most English translations of the Bible have Jesus reply with something like, ‘I am the one you are seeking’. The original Greek however, has Jesus simply saying, ‘I AM’. It is the last and most powerful ‘I AM’ declaration. You can see the strange effect of this by the response of those seeking him. They fell on the ground as though bowled over by a great power.”
Fleming Rutledge

“...the contemporary indifference to religion is accompanied by an indifference to many other things which are necessary for the welfare of society. It is essentially a negative attitude which implies the absence of any deep moral conviction and of any other social dynamics beyond the appeal to self-interest... It produces a society which is spiritually neutral and passive, and consequently it affords an easy prey for any strong aggressive revolutionary power, like Communism.”
​Christopher Dawson

“My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love. 
I walk deeper and deeper into the rushing water…the roar is so loud—this roar, this clapping of hands. These hands—the hands that heal; the hands that hold; the hands we desire because they are better than desire…. These hands—the hands that care, the hands that mold; the hands that touch the lips, the lips that speak the words—the words that tell us we are whole...”
-Douglas Coupland, Life After God.

“Have to toe the line, I’ve got to make the most. Spent all the years going, from pillar to post. Now I’m standing on the outside and I’m waiting in the rain. Tell me why must I always explain.
Bared my soul to the crowd... but oh what the cost. Most of them laughed out loud like nothings been lost. There were hypocrites and parasites and people that drain. Tell me why must I always explain.
I can’t be everywhere at once, there’s always someone to see. And I never turned out to be the person you wanted me to be. But I tell you who I am, time and time and time again. Tell me why must I always explain.
Well I get up in the morning and I get my brief. I go out and stare at the world in complete disbelief. It’s not righteous indignation that makes me complain. It’s the fact that I always have to explain”
Van Morrison

“Come, all of you who thirst, come to the waters; and you without money, come, buy, and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk, without money and without cost!
Why spend money on that which is not bread, and your labor on that which does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of foods.”
Isaiah 55

​“...the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn... to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendour.”
Isaiah 61

“a young man screams for justice and an old man pleads for mercy”
Author unknown

“The human community is never more endangered than when totalitarianism appears to be benevolent... and thus our imagination is captured to the detriment of real discernment.”
Michael D. O’Brien, Family and the New Totalitarianism. 

“A Christian is an Oak, flourishing in winter.”
Thomas Traherne

“The older you get, the more you become like yourself”
Author unknown

​“The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.”
G.K. Chesterton

​There’s a table in the wilderness, where the blind can see and the poor possess
Where the weak are strong and the first one’s last... there’s a table in the wilderness
There’s a table in the wilderness, where the blessed sing of His tenderness
Where the lame can walk and the weary rest, at the table in the wilderness
Russ Taff

“The wisdom of the journeyman is to work one day at a time and he always said that any job even if it took years was made up out of a day’s work. Nothing more. Nothing less. That was hard for me to learn. I always wanted to be finished. In the concept of a day’s work is rhythm and pace and wholeness.” 
Cormac McCarthy, The Stonemason: A Play in Five Acts

​“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters....”
Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

“As for my father, I never knew whether he believed God was a mathematician but he certainly believed God could count and that only by picking up God’s rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty.”
Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

“The deepest mystery of all, I think, is the one to which Biblical faith points, which is the idea that we are made not only of matter that comes from earth and stars, but we are also made in the image of God. I don’t know what that means altogether, but I think it means that we bear his mark upon us. Deep within us. I think this is the place from which all true art comes, and by true art I mean art that doesn’t just entertain... but true art that nourishes the spirit, that illuminates the mind, that deepens the understanding, that deepens our humanity...”
Frederick Buechner

“Rules never changed anyone’s heart, only love can do that.”
Saint William of Oakville
​
“Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.”
​Blaise Pascall

“Building furniture is only a metaphor. My story is about practice and forgiveness. Mastery of anything is an accumulation of experiences that points out the truth of these things: you will get old, and you can learn from your mistakes.. The things you make will also accumulate and survive you. Do your best with every job. There will be evidence.”
​Gary Rogowski, Handmade

“I have not been qualified for anything I have ever succeeded at, in life”.
Trevor Toop

​“I have spent a good part of my time in the wilderness. Fortunately, God is most usually also found in the wilderness.”
Trevor Toop

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
Saul Bellow
“Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road