“Since we nowadays think that all a man needs for acquisition of truth is to exert his brain more or less vigorously, and since we consider an ascetic approach to knowledge hardly sensible, we have lost the awareness of the close bond that links the knowledge of truth to the condition of purity.  Thomas says that unchastity's first-born daughter is blindness of the spirit

Later during the same breakfast.

A group of us were having breakfast together.  My friend, who runs a small business, was telling a story.

“Man is descended from the apes; therefore

In his 1972 speech on “Conscience in Our Time,” Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger quotes a remark by Adolf Hitler:  "I liberate man from the coercion of a mind that has become an end in itself; from the dirty and degrading self-inflicted torments of a chimera called conscience and morality and from the demands of a freedom and personal autonomy to which only a v

Professor:

"In the absence of … faith … we govern by tenderness.  It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory.  When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.  It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber."  --  Flannery O'Connor, introduction to 

 "We can't go arresting people for what they say in a private conversation in a café.  I've no doubt we shall come to that eventually, but at the present stage of our struggle for freedom, it just can't be done."  --  Colonel Plum, in Evelyn Waugh, 

Professor:

“It is a well-known fact that few persons can stand safely on the edge of a precipice, or walk along the parapet wall of a house, without being in danger of throwing themselves down; not we presume from a principle of self-preservation; but in consequence of a strong idea having taken possession of their mind, from which it cannot well escape, which absorbs every other co