Rare and outstanding excellence in some trivial matter is unfitting to a man of honor.
-Montaigne

The philosopher Ronald De Sousa once described philosophical theology as "intellectual tennis without a net," and I readily allow that I have indeed been assuming without comment or question up to now that the net of rational judgment was up. But we can lower it if you really want to. It's your serve. Whatever you serve, suppose I return service rudely as follows: "What you say implies God is a ham sandwich wrapped in tinfoil. That's not much of a God to worship!" If you then volley back, demanding to know how I can logically justify my claim that your serve has such a preposterous implication, I will reply, "Oh, do you want the net up for my returns, but not for your serves? Either the net stays up, or it stays down. If the net is down, there are no rules and anybody can say anything, a mug's game if there ever was one. I have been giving you the assumption that you would not waste your own time or mine by playing with the net down." Now if you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to play. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith seriously as a way of getting to the truth, and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other (a worthy function that I do take seriously). But you must not expect me to go along with your defense of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify. Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side. You are sightseeing with a loved one in a foreign land, and your loved one is brutally murdered in front of your eyes. At the trial it turns out that in this land friends of the accused may be called as witnesses for the defense, testifying about their faith in his innocence. You watch the parade of his moist-eyed friends, obviously sincere, proudly proclaiming their undying faith in the innocence of the man you saw commit the terrible deed. The judge listens intently and respectfully, obviously more moved by this outpouring than by all the evidence presented by the prosecution. Is this not a nightmare? Would you be willing to live in such a land? Or would you be willing to be operated on by a surgeon who tells you that whenever a little voice in him tells him to disregard his medical training, he listens to the little voice? I know it passes in polite company to let people have it both ways, and under most circumstances I wholeheartedly cooperate with this benign arrangement. But we're seriously trying to get at the truth here, and if you think that this common but unspoken understanding about faith is anything better than socially useful obfucsation to avoid mutual embarrassment and loss of face, you have obviously seen much more deeply into this issue than any philosopher ever has (for none has ever come up with a good defense of this) or you are kidding yourself. (The ball is now in your court.)
-Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea

If I have trouble drawing the blueprint of a credible utopia, possibly it's because I've seen too many television commercials, heard too many banquet speeches, swallowed too much propaganda about how the free market is another name for democracy. The market, of course, isn't democratic; nor is it interested in the public good. The market speaks only to money -- politely to people with a lot of it, rudely to those without -- and the merchants of bliss address their sales pitches to the private good, targeting the demographics, dividing communities into postal codes and telephone exchanges, breaking down the family members into profitable fragments of will and appetite, wish and dream. Incapable of making moral or aesthetic judgments, the market happily commissions the building of St. Paul's Cathedral and the furnaces of Treblinka. The customer is always right.
The notion that the consumer economy somehow possesses "values" (as if it were an old trout fisherman or a bishop) is ridiculous on its face, but for the moment it commands the affection and respect not only of the newspapers and banks but also of the universities, the art colonies, and the scientific guilds -- i.e., most of the people who might otherwise be looking for a way out of the perfume salesman's dream of Eden.
-Lewis H. Lapham

We talk sometimes of a talent for conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some individuals. Conversation is an evanescent relation -- no more. A man is reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin or uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought he will regain his tongue.
-Emerson

You know what it's like when two people start a conversation. First one of them does all the talking, the other one breaks in with "That's just like me, I ..." and goes on talking about himself until his partner finds a chance to say, "That's just like me, I ..." The "That's just like me, I ...'s" may look like a form of agreement, a way of carrying the other party's idea a step further, but that is an illusion. What they really are is a brute revolt against brute force, an attempt to free one's ear from bondage, a frontal attack the objective of which is to occupy the enemy's ears. All man's life among men is nothing more than a battle for the ears of others.
-Milan Kundera

We have fixed up a world for ourselves in which we can live -- assuming bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content: without these articles of faith, nobody would now endure life. But that does not mean that they have been proved. Life is no argument; the conditions of life could include error.
-Nietzsche

The misery of gaols is not half their evil; they are filled with every corruption which poverty and wickedness can generate between them; with all the shameless and profligate enormities that can be produced by the impudence of ignominy, the rage of want, and the malignity of despair. In prison the awe of the public eye is lost, and the power of the law is spent; there are few fears, there are no blushes. The lewd inflame the lewd, the audacious harden the audacious. Every one fortifies himself as he can against his own sensibility, endeavors to practice on others the arts that are practiced on himself; and gains the kindness of his associates by similitude of manners. Thus some sink amidst their misery, and others survive only to propogate villainy. ... If there are any made so obdurate by avarice or cruelty as to resolve these consequences without dread or pity, I must leave them to be awakened by some other power, for I write only to human beings.
-Samuel Johnson, 1758

Everyone thinks himself the master pattern of human nature; and by this, as a touchstone, he tests all others. Behavior that does not square with his is false and artificial. What brutish stupidity!
-Montaigne

He's almost slipping into the toilet, he's so relaxed.
-overheard on TV

Only justice can give security; and by 'justice' I mean the recognition of the equal claims of all human beings.
-Bertrand Russell, What I Believe

Unbeing dead isn't being alive.
-frente

Your goodness must have some edge to it, --else it is none.
-Emerson

But I have never believed the people when they talked about great men -- and I held to my belief that it was an inverse cripple, who had too little of everything and too much of one thing.
-Nietzsche

If you're so special, why aren't you dead?
-the Breeders

They do not seem to have any notion of biting; but when much frightened they squirt a drop of fluid from each nostril. One day I carried one to a deep pool left by the retiring tide, and threw it in as far as I was able. It invariably returned in a direct line to the spot where I stood.
-Charles Darwin, toying with marine iguanas

It is not the tailor alone who is the ninth part of a man; it is as much the preacher, and the merchant, and the farmer. Where is the division of labor to end? and what object does it finally serve? No doubt another may also think for me; but it is not therefore desirable that he should do so to the exclusion of my thinking for myself.
-Thoreau, Walden

You could lip-synch to the talk-shows.
-U2

Why is he on the outside squandering his goodness on outcasts like me? Maybe the answer is that there is no in. Maybe the whole damned country is pushing and shoving and screaming to get into someplace that doesn't exist, because they don't know that the outside could be the inside if only they would stop all this pushing and shoving and screaming, and they haven't got enough sense to realize that. That makes sense. I've got the answer all figured out, simple and neat and sensible.
-John Okada, No-No Boy

These memories, too, are bound to die so our dreams will have to serve us.
-Cowboy Junkies (Michael Timmons)

Hog ears are smoked for dog chews and sell for $1.10 a pound.
-The Oregonian, 2/12/97, page C-1, emphasis ours

All your stupid friends love you for your brain.
-frente

But what is worship? To do the will of God -- that is worship. And what is the will of God? -- to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me -- that is the will of God. Now, Queequeg is my fellow man. And what do I wish that this Queequeg would do to me? Why, unite with me in my particular Presbyterian form of worship. Consequently, I must then unite with him in his; ergo, I must turn idolator. So I kindled the shavings; helped prop up the innocent little idol; offered him burnt biscuit with Queequeg; salaamed before him twice or thrice; kissed his nose; and that done, we undressed and went to bed, at peace with our own consciences and all the world.
-Melville, Moby Dick

I'll tell you one: 'The Snake and the Fox.' Once upon a time, a snake came up to a fox and said, 'It seems to me that I know you!' The fox replied to him: 'Me too.' 'Then,' said the snake, 'give me some money.' 'A fox doesn't give money,' replied the tricky animal, who, in order to escape, jumped down into a deep ravine full of strawberries and chicken honey. But the snake was there waiting for him with a Mephistopholean laugh. The fox pulled out his knife, shouting: 'I'm going to teach you how to live!' Then he took to flight, turning his back. But he had no luck. The snake was quicker. With a well-chosen blow of his fist, he struck the fox in the middle of his forehead, which broke into a thousand pieces, while he cried: 'No! No! Four times no! I'm not your daughter!'
-Eugene Ionesco, The Bald Soprano

A step lower and strangeness creeps in: perceiving that the world is 'dense,' sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us, with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise. The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millenia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us... Just one thing: that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the Absurd.
-Albert Camus from The Myth of Sisyphus

'Daddy, where did I come from?'
'Uh . . . uh . . . Well, Tommy, well, it seems . . . well . . . Why, why out of the garbage can, son. The garbage man comes and throws you in the garbage can and Mommy goes out and gets you. You see, the garbage men pick you up at the creampuff, cherry gingerbread house run by the angels with the puppy faces, and the North Star wonder men with the magic seeds tiptoe 'round the huckleberry tree.'
'Well, where did the clock-radio come from?'
'Oh . . . same place.'
-Steve Martin, "The Nervous Father"

Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man that a soldier, a soldier's servant, a cook, a porter brags, and wishes to have his admirers. Even philosophers wish for them. Those who write against it want to have the glory of having written well; and those who read it desire the glory of having read it. I who write this have perhaps this desire, and perhaps those who will read it . . .
-Pascal, Pensées

Death closes all; but something ere the end, 
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we will touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are, --
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
-Tennyson, Ulysses, closing lines