Given these outstanding accomplishments, much now depends on the level of performance of the Grim Reaper. Can he be counted on to do the job? Mortuary management was gloomy on this score, noting that due to medical advances in the treatment of cancer and heart disease, the death rate was bound to decline. Not so the brokerage houses and investment analysts. The Goldman Sachs brokerage house, analyzing their prospects, predicts a rosy future: "Aggregate deaths have increased at roughly 1.1 percent on a compound basis since 1940. . . . Going forward, the continued aging of the baby-boomers, coupled with an increasing proportion of people over age 65, should keep aggregate deaths rising. . . . The aging of America should enable the death care industry to experience extremely stable demand in the future."

—Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death

Of all the dangers in life, there is perhaps none more treacherous than getting precisely what you want. As it has been said, the mistakes we male and female mortals make when we have our own way persist in raising wonder at our fondness of it.

—A. Natasha Joukovsky, The Portrait of a Mirror

He snorted when I talked about how wonderful it might have been. "Wonderful," he said. "Do you know that one of the biggest cause of death in those days was people killing themselves?"

"How, killing themselves?"

"With weapons, like the ones I told you about; with poisons and drugs; by throwing themselves from high buildings; by employing oh any number of engines that the angels made for other reasons."

"And they did that deliberately?"

"Deliberately."

"Why?"

"For as many reasons as you have to say the time they lived in was wonderful."

—John Crowley, Engine Summer

"Yes," Painted Red said. "Phones. It seemed, in those days, that the more the angels had to ride on, and talk over distances with, and get together by, the more separate they became. The more they made the world smaller, the greater the distance between them."

—John Crowley, Engine Summer

Circular motion, one of the most useful and frequent attributes of a fully developed machine is, curiously, one of the least observable motions in nature.

—Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

The average professor today is not a scholar. He is ready to do research only as long as it is necessary for promotion. Once he becomes a full professor and has tenure, he becomes disinterested in learning, because his world is a better hiding place from education than a place for education. Few professors are adequate teachers; they are not enough interested in either teaching or scholarship to do more than go through the motions.

—R. J. Rushdoony, Law and Liberty

Many of the sixteenth-century Protestant churches that cleansed their sanctuaries of religious paintings and sculptures were among the first both to sponsor composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach to write stunning hymns for the church and to install impressive pipe organs in their sanctuaries to perform them.

—Cameron Anderson, The Faithful Artist

It was not well enough for the faithful, in those days, to depend upon the word of God, and to engage in those ceremonial services which he required, unless, aided by external symbols, they elevated their minds above these, and yielded to God spiritual worship. God, indeed, gave real tokens of his presence in that visible sanctuary, but not for the purpose of binding the senses and thoughts of his people to earthly elements; he wished rather that these external symbols should serve as ladders, by which the faithful might ascend even to heaven.

—John  Calvin, quoted in David Taylor ed., For the Beauty of the Church

By dispensing with totalizing metanarratives, postmodernism is left without the conceptual resources to understand the voice of the other at all. There is no human nature, language is merely a social construction unrelated to objective reality, and there is no God-given meaning or value in the world. Therefore, various cultures and kinds of people become opaque to one another—monads of otherness, as it were.

—Douglas Groothuis, Truth Decay

Up to now, as we have all observed together, it is in the most barbarous centuries that the most useful discoveries are made; it seems that the role of the most enlightened periods and of the most learned gatherings is to ponder over what ignorant persons have invented. We know nowadays, after the long disputes of Mr. Huyghens and M. Renaud, how to determine the most advantageous angle made by the rudder of a vessel with the keel; but Christopher Columbus had discovered America without even suspecting the existence of that angle. I certainly do not infer from this that we should confine ourselves to working in the dark; but it would be well that physicists and geometricians joined practice to theory as much as possible. Is it necessary that what does most honor to the human mind should often be that which is least useful?

—Voltaire, Philosophical Letters

[Shakespeare] was a fecund genius, full of vigor, ranging from simple naturalness to the sublime, without the least glimmer of taste or the slightest knowledge of the rules. I am going to tell you something rash, but true: the greatness of Shakespeare has been the ruin of the English stage. There are such beautiful scenes, such grand and terrible passages scattered throughout those monstrous farces of his called tragedies, that these plays have always been put on with great success. Time, which alone makes the reputation of men, in the end makes their faults respectable.

—Voltaire, Philosophical Letters

The postmodern understanding of truth-as-power leads to a postmodern political praxis, in which language is intentionally manipulated to institute these new modes of reality. This is why there is so much emphasis on policing speech—creating new pronouns and mandating their use, constantly changing the definitions of terms like gender, continually proliferating new categories of and subcategories of identity and desire. This is a concerted effort to enforce a new truth-script through an exercise of power.

—Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender