John > John's Quotes

“But within those numbers, there are other stories. For one, the statistics show a sharp and notable drop in life expectancy over 1932–4, across a wide range of groups. Before 1932, urban men had a life expectancy at birth of 40 to 46 years, and urban women 47 to 52 years. Rural men had a life expectancy of 42 to 44 years, and rural women 45 to 48 years. By contrast, Ukrainian men born in 1932, in either the city or countryside, had an average life expectancy of about 30. Women born in that year could expect to live on average to 40. For those born in 1933, the numbers are even starker. Females born in Ukraine in that year lived, on average, to be eight years old. Males born in 1933 could expect to live to the age of five.6 These”
― Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine

“While the Reconstruction struggle ensued in Washington and across the South, Edward A. Pollard, wartime editor of the Richmond Examiner, wrote his long manifesto, The Lost Cause, published in 1867. Pollard issued a warning to all who would ever try to shape the memory of the Civil War, much less Reconstruction policy. “All that is left the South,” wrote Pollard, “is the war of ideas.” The war may have decided the “restoration of the union and the excision of slavery,” declared Pollard, “but the war did not decide Negro equality.”39 Reconstruction was at once a struggle over ideas, interests, and memory.”
― David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

“The young don’t know that experience is a defeat and that we must lose everything in order to win a little knowledge.”
― Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays

“People who are in the business of hating the relatively new-fashioned use of “begs the question” hate it vehemently, and they hate it loudly. Unfortunately, subbing in “raises the question” or “inspires the query” or any number of other phrasings fools no one; one can always detect the deleted “begs the question,” a kind of prose pentimento, for those of you who were paying attention in art history class or have read Lillian Hellman’s thrilling if dubiously accurate memoir.”
― Benjamin Dreyer, Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

“When you gaze a long while fixedly at the deep sky thoughts and feelings for some reason merge in a sense of loneliness. One begins to feel hopelessly solitary, and everything one used to look upon as near and akin becomes infinitely remote and valueless; the stars that have looked down from the sky thousands of years already, the mists and the incomprehensible sky itself, indifferent to the brief life of man, oppress the soul with their silence when one is left face to face with them and tries to grasp their significance. One is reminded of the solitude awaiting each one of us in the grave, and the reality of life seems awful . . . full of despair. . . .”
― Anton Chekhov, The Complete Short Novels

“There are some angry and desperate people in the Church. That is because they hear only God’s command, only His demands, because they remember only this much about Jesus Christ. They cannot see Him as a gracious and good God; they see Him only as a Boss or a Tyrant. There is something else for which you must remember Him, without which remembering your lives can’t be great or wonderful—His love, His infinite love, His inexhaustible, prodigal, wonderful love, high as the sky, deep as the sea, love that moved Him to the cross to suffer for His enemies, love that still loves Him to forgive when we have wronged Him and one another.”
― Roy Harrisville, Tell it on the Mountain: A Collection of Sermons

“you’re mine two times over—I made you, and now I’ve bought you!” God made you, God created you, and He bought you at Golgotha with the blood of Jesus Christ. You are His, twice over! He has a claim on you. As the beloved Apostle Paul put it: “He are not your own for ye are bought with a price.” He has a right to everything you are and everything you have; to your mind, your soul, your tongue, your hands and feet, your talents, your capacities, your life, and above all, He claims your obedience, obedience in the receiving of His Last Supper, obedience in love, love for Him and for all men everywhere. Through His Church, those who rule it and those who compose it, “make it up,” He has a right to demand everything of you, even your life. There is nothing you may withhold from Him. So, remember Jesus Christ. He has a claim on you! But if you remembered only this, I couldn’t promise that your life would be great and wonderful. Indeed, it could become quite intolerable. For if you were only aware that God has a right to demand anything of you, anything at all, in the end you might become angry with Him for requiring so much. Or you might despair, of God first of all, but especially of yourself when”
― Roy Harrisville, Tell it on the Mountain: A Collection of Sermons