Before the lovely Augustine passage, a quick note:  Two links have just been added to my Listen to Talks page.  You can hear highlights from my recent talk to the Stanford University Anscombe Society on the meaning of the sexual powers

Professor:

“The parent seeking to be the friend of the child necessarily forfeits authority.  As this egalitarian drive works itself out, indeed, children of quite a young age come increasingly under the jurisdiction of the state, exercising its suasion through social workers, and they acquire rights which make it increasingly difficult for either teachers or parents to exercise aut

Query:

“As far as cannibalism goes, Jeffrey Dahmer, man, he was out of money and had to eat, man.   I don't know -- it's really grotesque and stretching the wire -- but he did what he had to do.  I don't agree with him, but I don't know, man.”  --  Student in Daytona Beach, Florida, quoted by R.C. Sproul

“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