Art-making and parenthood act very efficiently as disincentives to one another, and people who say otherwise are deluded, or childless, or men.

—Claire Dederer, Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen Receive. Get yourself out of the way.

—C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

Too much hope for Earth had led men to try to make it Eden.

—Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz

Invention had become a duty, and the desire to use the new marvels of technics, like a child's delighted bewilderment over new toys, was not in the main guided by critical discernment.

—Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

Selfishness blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life, but in the long run it attacks and destroys all others and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness. Selfishness is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society more than to another; individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of condition.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

The question for artists is: Are you prepared to get to know the "bass lines" of artistic tradition, and, more fundamentally, the bass lines that God uses to hold his church in the faith? As T. S. Eliot so pointedly asked, How can we be original until we've lived inside a great tradition? How can we even begin to improvise in a way that beguiles our culture until we have something profound to improvise with?

—Jeremy Begbie, "The Future," in David Taylor ed., For the Beauty of the Church

"New morality" follows the situation ethics set forth popularly by Joseph Fletcher. Fletcher summarized his view of ethics by saying, "We must always do what love requires in the situation." This maxim, if it stood alone, would be sound. We are always responsible to do what love demands in a situation. Love is the linchpin of the law of God. The problem remains how to know what love requires in a given situation. God's law reveals what God's love requires.

When Paul speaks of the ethics of love, he says, "And live a life of love, just as Christ loved us..." (Eph. 5:2). But the apostle does not stop with an ambiguous appeal to love. In the next breath he says, "But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God's holy people" (Eph. 5:3). Here the law of God defines what is consistent with love. Appeals to love are frequently used to excuse sin. The oldest ploy in the world for sexual seduction is, "If you love me, you will." Yet Paul declares, "If you love God, you won't. Ever."

—R. C. Sproul, Playing God

Arguments are made about a woman's right to abortion, but not a mother's right to abortion. The woman is taken as an individualistic, atomistic entity, not as a person in a fabric of duties and responsibilities as well as rights.

—R. C. Sproul, Playing God

The faith in one's natural goodness is a constant encouragement to evade moral responsibility. To accept responsibility is to follow the line of maximum effort, whereas man's secret desire is to follow, if not the line of least, at all events the line of lesser resistance. The endless twisting and dodging and proneness to look for scapegoats that results is surely the least reputable aspect of human nature. Rousseau writes to Madame de Francueil (20 April, 1751) that it was her class, the class of the rich, that was responsible for has having had to abandon his children. With responsibility shifted from one's self to the rich, the next step is inevitable, namely to start a crusade against the members of a class which, without any warrant from "Nature," oppresses its brothers, the members of other classes, and forces them into transgression. A man may thus dodge his duties as a father, and at the same time pose as a paladin of humanity. Rousseau is very close here to our most recent agitators. If a working girl falls from chastity, for example, do not blame her, blame her employer. She would have remained a model of purity if he had only added a dollar or two a week to her wage. With the progress of the new morality every one has become familiar with the type of the perfect idealist who is ready to pass laws for the regulation of everybody and everything except himself, and who knows how to envelop in a mist of radiant words schemes the true driving power of which is the desire to confiscate property.

—Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

The only guiding principle in this paradigm is consent. You, a free agent, can do anything you want, as long as it does not compromise the free agency of another. Let me be clear: consent is crucial. An emphasis on the importance of consent is perhaps the one good feature of this paradigm. The problem is not that consent is a primary value in this view; the problem is that it's the only value. Consent should be the starting point rather than the end of the discussion about sexual morality. It is not enough to say that the best we can expect from sex, morally speaking, is that it's not rape.

—Abigail Favale, The Genesis of Gender

In 1859 the State Superintendent of Public Instruction declared that "our present school system has furnished instruction to only 11,183 children out of 40,530; and to them for only five and a half months out of the twelve. If we do not take instant and effective means to remedy it these 29,347 neglected children will grow up into 29.347 benighted men and women—a number nearly sufficient at ordinary times to control the vote of the state, and in consequence to shape its legislation and its destiny." The legislature did not take "instant" measures of relief, and the 29,347 unfortunate ignoramuses were well along the road to maturity before the state's conscience troubled it.

—Louis B. Wright, Culture on the Moving Frontier

The provisional government, concerned that the tsar's abdication would be exploited by its enemies in the Great War, issued an order requiring soldiers to return to duty and obey their officers.

—Isaac Butler, The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

Those who are most firmly persuaded that the future is immutably bound up with the present in which their work is lying, will best husband their present, and till it with the greatest care.

—Samuel Butler, Erewhon

"You shouldn't lie till ten. There's the very prime of the morning gone long before that time. A person who has not done one half his day's work by ten o'clock, runs a chance of leaving the other half undone."

—Emily Brontë;, Wuthering Heights

The surest way of training people to violate the rights of the living is to set at nought the wishes of the dead.

—Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution

I came under heavy pressure from the king of France and the King of Navarre to take the cross myself. I replied to them that while I had been overseas in the service of God and the king, and in the aftermath of my return, the officials of the kings of France and Navarre had opressed and impovershed my people to such an extent that there would never be a time when they and I would be in a worse position. I told them that if I wanted to act in accordance with God's will I would stay here in order to help and protect my people. For if I were to expose my life to the dangers of the pilgrimage of the cross when I could quite clearly see that this would be to the harm and detriment of my people, I would incur the anger of God, who offered up his life in order to save his people.

—John of Joinville, The Life of Saint Louis

[Charlemagne] was so concerned  for the education of his sons and daughters that he never dined without them when at home, and he never journeyed without them.

---Einhard, The Life of Charlemagne