Kyle Grindberg > Kyle's Quotes

“In The Silver Chair, the Marsh-wiggle Puddleglum is all wisdom in rebutting the witch as she denies the existence of the world in which he believes. But as children's fiction isn't quite academically respectable, I'll pretend that I learned this from Blaise Pascal. [...] If the world really is accidental and devoid of meaning, and you and I have no more value in the cosmos than you average bread mold, and Beauty and Goodness are artificial constructs imagined within an explosion, constructs that are controlled by chemical reactions within the accident and have no necessary correspondence to reality, then my made-up children's world licks your real world silly. Depart from me. Go drown in your seething accident. Puddleglum and I are staying here.”
― N.D. Wilson, Notes From The Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God's Spoken World

“Kraus asks the question of Freudian analysis: What would be enough? At what point would talking about one’s problems for x hours a week, be sufficient to bring one to a state of “normalcy”?

The genius of Freudianism, Kraus writes, is not the creation of a cure, but of a disease—the universal, if intermittent, human sentiment that “something is not right,” elaborated into a state whose parameters, definitions, and prescriptions are controlled by a self-selecting group of “experts,” who can never be proved wrong.

It was said that the genius of the Listerine campaign was attributable to the creation not of mouthwash, but of halitosis. Kraus indicts Freud for the creation of the nondisease of dissatisfaction. (See also the famous “malaise” of Jimmy Carter, which, like Oscar Wilde’s Pea Soup Fogs, didn’t exist ’til someone began describing it.) To consider a general dissatisfaction with one’s life, or with life in general as a political rather than a personal, moral problem, is to exercise or invite manipulation. The fortune teller, the “life coach,” the Spiritual Advisor, these earn their living from applying nonspecific, nonspecifiable “remedies” to nonspecifiable discomforts.The sufferers of such, in medicine, are called “the worried well,” and provide the bulk of income and consume the bulk of time of most physicians. It was the genius of the Obama campaign to exploit them politically. The antecedent of his campaign has been called Roosevelt’s New Deal, but it could, more accurately, be identified as The Music Man.”
― David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture

“We long ago ceased expecting that a President speak his own words. We no longer expect him actually to know the answers to questions put to him. We have, in effect, come to elect newscasters-and by a similar process: not for their probity or for their intelligence, but for their "believability."

"Hope" is a very different exhortation than, for example, save, work, cooperate, sacrifice, think. It means: "Hope for the best, in a process over which you have no control." For, if one had control, if one could endorse a candidate with actual, rational programs, such a candidate demonstrably possessed of character and ability sufficient to offer reasonable chance of carrying these programs out, we might require patience or understanding, but why would we need hope?

We have seen the triumph of advertising's bluntest and most ancient tool, the unquantifiable assertion: "New" in what way? "Improved" how? "Better" than what? "Change" what in particular? "Hope" for what?

These words, seemingly of broad but actually of no particular meaning, are comforting in a way similar to the self-crafted wedding ceremony.

Whether or not a spouse is "respecting the other's space," is a matter of debate; whether or not he is being unfaithful is a matter of discernible fact. The author of his own marriage vows is like the supporter of the subjective assertion. He is voting for codependence. He neither makes nor requires an actual commitment. He'd simply like to "hope.”
― David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture

“Objectivity is a false god, and the worship of this idol is particularly pernicious in disciplines like journalism and history. It is not possible to be objective----although of course it is possible to be honest. By pretending to attain to objectivity, a writer's fundamental faith commitments are not eliminated, but rather submerged----and they then come out in interesting and intellectually dishonest ways.”
― Douglas Wilson, Black and Tan: Essays and Excursions on Slavery, Culture War, and Scripture in America

“The hidden influence of such thinking on Protestant Christianity, of course, has been enormous. No Protestant body would professor even consider what the religious humanists said in 1933. Yet on a practical level, a metaphysical doubt is present. When the doubt remains unchallenged, it leads modern Christians into a position very similar to that of the ancient gnostics. If the heresiarchs devised archons to be responsible for the mistakes of the cosmos, thereby free­ing God of responsibility, a scientifically oriented generation has in­terposed its own archons: the big bang, probability, evolution, all of which provide some distance between God and this deficient cosmos.”
― Philip J. Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics

“[beware that] “many of what are called social problems are differences between the theories of intellectuals and the realities of the world—differences which many intellectuals interpret to mean that it is the real world that is wrong and needs changing.”
― Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

“Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth: this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert — himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt — the Divine Reason”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Men cannot give a meaning to history that they themselves lack, nor can they honor a past which indicts them for their present failures.”
― Rousas John Rushdoony, The Biblical Philosophy of History

“Obedience is the opener of eyes.”
― George MacDonald

“And though St. John saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

“It is the truth which is assailed in any age which tests our fidelity. It is to confess we are called, not merely to profess. If I profess, with the loudest voice and the clearest exposition, every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christianity. Where the battle rages the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battle-field besides is mere flight and disgrace to him if he flinches at that one point.”
― Elizabeth Rundle Charles, Chronicles of the Schönberg-Cotta Family

“Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.”
― Frederic Bastiat, The Law

“The Bible- banned, burned, beloved. More widely read, more frequently attacked than any other book in history. Generations of intellectuals have attempted to discredit it; dictators of every age have outlawed it and executed those who read it. Yet soldiers carry it into battle believing it is more powerful than their weapons. Fragments of it smuggled into solitary prison cells have transformed ruthless killers into gentle saints. Pieced together scraps of Scripture have converted whole whole villages of pagan Indians.”
― Charles Colson

“the phrase “stay-at-home mom” is patronizing and faintly derogatory, like “stick-in-the-mud mom” or “sit-in-the-corner mom.” Do we talk about a “chained-to-the-desk mom” or a “stuck-in-traffic mom” or a “languishing-in-meetings mom”?”
― Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture

“All shall be done, but it may be harder than you think.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

“You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”
― Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

“We need to make sure we are doing what Jesus said and not what we thought Jesus must have said. The textbook case against Christian activism can be made in one word—Prohibition—the word that would have made the Lord Jesus at Cana into a moonshiner felon. We did a great job there of setting aside the Word of God for the sake of our tradition”
― Douglas Wilson, Empires of Dirt: Secularism, Radical Islam, and the Mere Christendom Alternative

“If a public policy screecher began demanding that we all start rationing salt water because the planet Earth (which is our only home) was about to run completely out, and that many leading theologians agreed with this (and they would too), and that they offered their agreement in the name of the Lord Jesus, and with many solemn amens, I would still want to know how they could possibly think we were going to run out of salt water”
― Douglas Wilson, Empires of Dirt: Secularism, Radical Islam, and the Mere Christendom Alternative

“Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom, Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become - because He made us. He invented us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be. . .It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Blaming public Christians for being ‘too political’ is like blaming Noah’s ark for being ‘too wet”
― Douglas Wilson, Empires of Dirt: Secularism, Radical Islam, and the Mere Christendom Alternative

“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“They want to keep the government ‘out of our bedrooms.’ What are they talking about? I have to live in their society, remember. And I built my house, which means I built my own bedroom. The government told me how far apart the studs had to be in my bedroom wall, they dictated how thick the sheetrock had to be, they mandated how far apart the sheetrock screws had to be, they had policies on the configuration of those sheetrock screws, they have laws on the size of the windows and what kind of glass I can have in them, and there are stern legal warnings on the mattress tags. What do you mean, you want to keep the government out of our bedrooms? The president is probably contemplating, right this minute, the establishment of a bedroom czar.”
― Douglas Wilson, Empires of Dirt: Secularism, Radical Islam, and the Mere Christendom Alternative

“God cannot be worshiped rightly in any culture without that worship challenging and dislocating all idolatries. To focus on the right worship of God is to declare war, it is to throw down the gauntlet. This is because when we worship God rightly, we have ascended into the heavenly places in order to glorify the name of Jesus Christ. He is glorified in Heaven, and then we ask, in humble faith, for God to glorify His name on earth as it has just been glorified in heaven. This is something that God is pleased to do, and this is why we ask for His kingdom to come, not for His kingdom to go”
― Douglas Wilson, Empires of Dirt: Secularism, Radical Islam, and the Mere Christendom Alternative

“If anyone seriously thinks by going natural, he will be escaping The Establishment, finally getting away from The Man and from the clutches of the good corporations, I have a bit of bad news. The corporations are way ahead of you. There are high-powered boards sitting around half-an-acre mahogany tables on the thirty-third floors of skyscrapers in New York City, and they are meeting right this minute, and they are making decisions on the marketing of the ponderosa pine bark chips, lightly salted. If you slice them thin enough, they approach being edible”
― Douglas Wilson, Confessions of a Food Catholic

“I don’t have any beef against wealthy people enjoying superior food . . . I do have a beef against upper middle class NPR listeners strolling down to farmer’s markets as though they were earthy peasants in touch with the rhythms of the earth. Why are they in touch with the rhythms of the earth? Well, because they are wealthy enough to pay three times more for corn on the cob than a guy who lives in a trailer on the edge of town, works at the sawmill, and buys his corn on the cob at Sam’s Club, the Philistine (pp. 87-88)”
― Douglas Wilson, Confessions of a Food Catholic