On Corruption

As the intellect becomes more corrupt, you eventually reach the place where you give up making sophistical appeals to reason at all. Once you've given up belief that there *is* any such thing as an "I ought" that has transcendent authority, "I want" still remains because it never made any claims to transcendence. And so it just becomes a naked struggle for power.


-Mark Shea

On Curiosity

"Soon the child's clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day... we become seekers."

- Peter Matthiessen

On Making Improvements

"Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new end."

- As We Understood...

On a New Brand of Politics

"It's the kind of partisanship where you're not even allowed to say that a Republican had an idea -- even if it's one you never agreed with. That kind of politics is bad for our party, it's bad for our country, and this is our chance to end it once and for all."

-Barack Obama