Sir, I respectfully disagree.

You cannot help a nation by simply giving handouts to the poor. Growing an economy "from the bottom up" is like growing a tree from the leaves down. -- W.S.

I want what he wants

"I want God, not my idea of God; I want my neighbour, not my idea of my neighbour; I want myself, not my idea of myself -- C. S. Lewis.

On the need for redemption

I accepted my need for a Savior on an evening in September 1969. The fact that a nation could put men on the moon, but a 15-year-old could not control his life enough to please his parents and himself--much less God--gave me perspective about just how serious the issue was. --W.S.

When we are most likely to pray

The illusion of total intelligibility, the indifference to the mystery that is everywhere, the foolishness of self-reliance are serious obstacles along the way. It is in moments of our being faced with the mystery of living and dying, of knowing and not knowing, of love and the inability to love—that we pray. —Abraham Joshua Heschel, in Man's Quest For God

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian novelist, dramatist and historian, died yesterday in Moscow. Here are two quotes from this remarkable thinker, writer and dissident. 

 It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the fIrst stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life. —FromThe Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation (Volume One) 

We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable.

We are unalike, me and I

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man. —Heraclitus

We are unalike, you and I

No two persons ever read the same book. — Edmund Wilson