Old Errors and New Labels Quotes

“Many a modern preacher is far less concerned with preaching Christ and Him crucified than he is with his popularity with his congregation. A want of intellectual backbone makes him straddle the ox of truth and the ass of nonsense. Bending the knee to the mob rather than God would probably make them scruple at ever playing the role of John the Baptist before a modern Herod. The acids of modernity are eating away the fossils of orthodoxy.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“And any form of philanthropy that forgets the doctrine of the common good for the false principle that society is a new entity for which individuals must be sacrificed, sooner or later will be advocating elimination of the unfit; the murder of defective infants — and then we shall have once more a paganism in which mothers will throw their children from Tarpeian Rocks,4 and in which new Herods will arise to practice birth-control as he did — even with the sword.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“The Church knows too that to marry the present age and its spirit is to become a widow in the next.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“What the new morality resolves itself into is this: You are wrong if you do a thing you do not feel like doing; and you are right if you do a thing you feel like doing. Such a morality is based not only on “fastidiousness,” but on “facetiousness.” The standard of morality then becomes the individual feeling of what is beautiful, instead of the rational estimate of what is right.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“there has sprung up a disturbing indifference to truth, and a tendency to regard the useful as the true, and the impractical as the false. The man who can make up his mind when proofs are presented to him is looked upon as a bigot, and the man who ignores proofs and the search for truth is looked upon as broadminded and tolerant.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“New Paganism may be defined as an outlook on life that holds to the sufficiency of human science without faith, and the sufficiency of human power without grace. In other words, its two tenets are Scientism which is a deification of the experimental method, and Humanism, which is a glorification of a man who makes God to his own image and likeness.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“Someone once told the story of a man who went out from England in a rowboat, came back, and made a great discovery — he discovered England. It is not unlikely that in the near future, the psychologists who left the shores of sane thinking in the rowboat Novelty will soon come back to those shores once again, and will make a great discovery — they will discover a soul. And those who make that discovery will be hailed as original thinkers, for if error multiplies, the most novel and original thing in the world will be truth.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“Truth does grow, but it grows homogeneously, like an acorn into an oak; it does not swing in the breeze, like a weathercock. The leopard does not change his spots nor the Ethiopian his skin, though the leopard be put in bars or the Ethiopian in pink tights. The nature of certain things is fixed, and none more so than the nature of truth. Truth may be contradicted a thousand times, but that only proves that it is strong enough to survive a thousand assaults.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“Perhaps the solicitation to pamper the way men live is too strong for them, for much of the business of philosophy at the present time seems to be to give high-sounding names to cover the sins of men. The clay is now molding the potter and the marble carving out the sculptor.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“Just as there are those who believe we should change morality to suit our amorality, so there are those who believe we should change God to suit our godlessness.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“A word of caution, then, is necessary when a statement is made by a scientist turned philosopher, just as a word of caution is necessary when a statement is made by a philosopher turned scientist, or an automobile manufacturer turned historian, or an oil man turned authority on church unity. This does not mean to imply that all the wrong is on the side of the scientists. Very often philosophers and theologians commit the same fallacy by passing premature judgments in the conclusions of science.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“It is well to remember that authorities in the field of science are really opinions, and that such authorities have a wax nose and can be led anywhere one chooses.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“The method of adjusting moral principles to the way men live is just such a perversion of the due order of things.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“There are ultimately only two possible adjustments in life: one is to suit our lives to principles; the other is to suit principles to our lives. “If we do not live as we think, we soon begin to think as we live.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“The repeated use of the word “crisis” in reference to morals is interesting, for it reveals a tendency on the part of many modern writers to blame the abstract when the concrete is really at fault. They speak, for example, of the problem of crime, rather than of the criminal; of the problem of poverty, rather than of the poor; and of the “crisis in morals,” when really the crisis is amongst men who are not living morally. The crisis is not in ethics but in the unethical. The failure is not in the law, but in the law-breakers.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“It is easier to get the attention of the press when one says, as Ibsen4 did, that “two and two make five,” than to be orthodox and say that two and two make four.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“Another evidence of this same disrespect for rational foundations is the general readiness of the modern mind to accept a statement because of the literary way in which it is couched, or because of the popularity of the one who says it, rather than for the reasons behind the statement.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“religious leaders have agreed not to disagree and those beliefs for which some of our ancestors would have died they have melted into a spineless Humanism.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“In the circuits of the planets there are times when the heavens are under the earth, and in the ways of God with men there was a time when Heaven was under the earth, and that was when Christ was born in the cave of Bethlehem.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“The hardest thing to find in the world today is an argument. Because so few are thinking, naturally there are found but few to argue. Prejudice there is in abundance and sentiment too, for these things are born of enthusiasms without the pain of labor. Thinking, on the contrary, is a difficult task; it is the hardest work a man can do — that is perhaps why so few indulge in it.”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels

“A character is made by the kind of thoughts a man thinks when alone, and a civilization is made by the kind of thoughts a man speaks to his neighbor. On”
― Fulton J. Sheen, Old Errors and New Labels