The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you read more

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

Kant, as we all know, compared moral law to the starry heavens,
and found them both sublime. On the read more

Kant, as we all know, compared moral law to the starry heavens,
and found them both sublime. On the naturalistic hypothesis we
should rather compare it to the protective blotches on a beetle's
back, and find them both ingenious.

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and
provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and
provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.

The American elite is almost beyond redemption. . . . Moral
relativism has set in so deeply that the read more

The American elite is almost beyond redemption. . . . Moral
relativism has set in so deeply that the gilded classes have
become incapable of discerning right from wrong. Everything can
be explained away, especially by journalists. Life is one great
moral mush--sophistry washed down with Chardonnay. The ordinary
citizens, thank goodness, still adhere to absolutes. . . . It is
they who have saved the republic from creeping degradation while
their "betters" were derelict.

It is difficult to offend a New Yorker.

It is difficult to offend a New Yorker.

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning,--an
endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea read more

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning,--an
endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the
distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly
bodies.

Without civic morality communities perish; without personal morality their survival has no value.

Without civic morality communities perish; without personal morality their survival has no value.

We may pretend that we're basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.

We may pretend that we're basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.