Adrian Buck’s Reviews > A Canticle for Leibowitz > Status Update

'To minimize suffering and maximize security were natural and proper ends of society and Caesar. But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law - a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security."

"Nature imposes nothing that Nature hasn't prepared you to bear." - an Atomic Explosion is imposed by Man.

'If you'd seen what I've seen, you would too' - if I hadn't seen HBO's Chernobyl, I wouldn't have been so profoundly affected as I was by this section of the book.

'It never was any better, it never will be any better. It will only be richer or poorer, sadder but not wiser, until the very last day.'

'But you promise to begin restoring Man's control over Nature. But who will govern the use of the power to control natural forces?'

"For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human potrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature, and the ineffable logos of God." - Man, Nature and God - this triangle interests me.