What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?

It profits him the whole world.

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“Love thy neighbor.”

If you do, the commandment is superfluous.

If you don’t, it’s futile.

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No one has yet discovered what makes life, or what “life” is. The god explanation is not merely unsatisfactory, it is indefensible.

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I, me …  this bundle of congenial accidents; this hunger for existence; this dread.

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Start of a letter to my theoretical biographer: “Dear Avenging Angel …”

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The Left has become Death, the destroyer of our civilization.

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Where there is ideology, there will be schism.

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Often the more you understand the less you forgive.*

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Christianity was begotten by a vulgarized Hellenism upon a sentimentalized Judaism.

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Religious persons  say, “If you don’t believe in God you’ll believe in anything.” I say, “If you can believe in ‘God’ you can believe in anything.”**

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The fatter the government, the thinner the people.

The more generous the government, the more robbed the people.

The more secure the government, the more threatened the people.

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Justice is elusive but judgment is inescapable.

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The Roman writer Terence said, “Nothing human is alien to me.” Why can’t I say the same? So much that people do remains incomprehensible to me.

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There’s an awful lot of condescension in compassion and an awful lot of contempt in condescension.

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Curse: May you survive to live in the world of your ideals.***

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Many a belief can survive persecution but not critical examination.

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A good thing about the Universe and Life is that they have no purpose.

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Sado-Marxism …

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Russia cast off the Soviet Union – and revealed itself to be much the same. A wolf in wolf’s clothing.

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We are more likely to believe what we overhear than what we’re told.

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Searching for your true self? How do you know which is your true self – the seeker or the sought?

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Nothing is kept as long and carefully as a grievance.

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Now in my tenth decade, I ask other old people what they think or feel about dying, and find almost all agree it is not that we will die that troubles us so much as how.

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To a writer: A reader is a reluctant visitor to your mind. He will not enter your labyrinth unless you bait the path with fascination. His wonder, his curiosity must be aroused, or his amusement.

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Comes a Marxist, comes twaddle.

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A writer needs to know that he has weaknesses, vices.

An actor only needs to know that other people have them.

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Charity is okay, but only when practiced by consenting adults in private.

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I often feel lonely but seldom want company.

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Some are born ordinary, some achieve ordinariness, and some have ordinariness thrust upon them. I can’t think of anyone who’s had ordinariness thrust upon him. But I do know lots of people who’ve achieved ordinariness. They were geniuses until they were five and then became ordinary for the rest of their lives.

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As attractive as a scandal.

As complex as an animal.

As simple as a blow.

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Wither is what I do, not where I go.

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It is a sound principle not to do harm. Beyond infancy no one can achieve so impossibly high an aim, but it is good to try.

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Trying to reason with a Believer is like trying to crack an egg on a pillow.

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Many “principles” that people hold are not principles but pieties.

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We find Heaven and Hell on earth. Hell is a collective operation. Heaven depends on private enterprise.

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We fear that they might do unto us what we would like to do unto them.

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The value of human life cannot be measured: human life is itself the measure of value. Trying to measure it is like trying to measure the wetness of water.

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Human life as such has no goal, no theme, no point, no plan, no program, no meaning. History is a soap opera.

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Whatever a government does it does badly.

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Anarchism, nihilism, communism. In each case, a feeling in search of a politics.

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There is no “sin” of greed. There is a “sin” of envy. Let us be free to work for our own maximum profit. Let us have abundance. Let us have feasts, rich harvests, generosity, might, novelty, and splendor.

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Any idea that needs a law to defend it from criticism is ipso facto a bad idea.

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Footnotes:

*Quoted by P. J. O’Rourke, from an interview with me by The Times of London, as an epigraph for his book Holidays in Hell.

**Émile Leon Cammaerts (1878-1953) was a Belgian-born writer who lived and died in England, and who, in an essay on G. K. Chesterton, authored the famous quotation often wrongly attributed to Chesterton himself.: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.” 

***P0ssibly plagiarized from a Chinese sage. I’m not sure.

 

Jillian Becker     March 5, 2024

To start a lively discussion, we posted these statements on our Facebook page today.

The lively discussion followed. Maybe it will follow here too.

Gods did not create Man; Man created gods.

Religion not only teaches untruth, it excludes the search for truth.

There is no Mind presiding over this universe.

 

(The last two are among our Articles of Reason listed under Pages in our margin.)