If it were an art to overcome heresy with fire, the executioners would be the most learned doctors on earth.
Martin Luther,To the Christian Nobility of the German States

Some innocent dead men walking can now take hope. Two cases have been decided in the last four months...

He never wants anything but what's right and fair; only when you come to settle what's right and fair, it's everything that he wants and nothing that you want.
Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays

It is typical of the petty that they are inflamed by the news...

Both read the Bible day and night,
But thou read'st black where I read white.
-- William Blake, The Everlasting Gospel

The Pope is not the only person keeping religion in the news. His efforts to do so by inviting Anglicans to join his congregation,...

"God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in His Church, even to the reforming of Reformation itself..."
-- John Milton, Aereopagitica

If it had happened a few centuries ago it would have been part of the Counter-Reformation. Occurring now, it was still pretty significant. It was...

Books, like their authors, have no more than one way of coming into the world, but there are ten thousand to go out of it, and return no more.

Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, dedication.

It's not the same as learning that just in time for the...

In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
Laurence John Peter, The Peter Principle

The consumer doesn't understand how hard it is to be a Big Bank and, therefore, expects the Big Bank to be just as concerned about its customers as the little...

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
Sir Henry Wotton, The Disparity Between Buckingham and Essex (1651)

It is so easy to view the death penalty as nothing more than a means to an end that we sometimes overlook the fact that it should...

A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.
John C. Calhoun, Speech from 1836

The fun has not...

Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution

The Internet and talk radio are like magic. They can turn nothing into something. Not all who use it are magicians, however. Some are simply hucksters hoping to beguile...

Thou hast most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school . . . .
--Wm. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Act IV

Vigilance. Without it who knows what sorts of insidious messages would slip into the curriculum of public schools throughout the country.

The prospect...

They (Americans) equally detest the pageantry of a king and the supercilious hypocrisy of a bishop.

It could have been a teaching experience for Chuck, or Archbishop Charles Chaput, as he prefers to be called. It probably wasn't. His teachers would have been Cardinal...

The codfish lays ten thousand eggs,
The homely hen lays one;
The codfish never cackles
To tell you when she's done;
And so we scorn the codfish
While the homely hen we prize.
Which only goes to show you
That it pays...

There are men in the world who derive as stern an exaltation from the proximity of disaster and ruin, as others from success.
Winston Churchill, The Malakand Field Force

KBR will long remember August 7, 2009. Cheryl Harris will long remember August 7, 2009. Each will remember it for...

Won't [public flogging] be fine. Th' Govermint gives us too little amusemint nowadays. Th' fav'rite pastime iv civilized man is croolty to other civilized man.

It is always refreshing when awareness and consequences catch up with the absurd. For more than 40...

I've figured out there's no Santa Claus and I know there's no Easter Bunny. You might as well tell me what's wrong with the 4th of July.

They've taken all the fun out of cereal boxes. That's not all. They've imposed big fines on...

It is time to review the rules for confessions of infidelity by public figures. They do not address toilet stall tap dancing since that, being a solo performance, raises different issues from the dalliances here addressed. These involve married couples. A number of matters of etiquette present themselves and the...

"Secrecy and a free, democratic government don't mix." -- Harry S. Truman, Merle Miller, Plain Speaking.

At first one seeks comfort in the fact that in the Obama administration, it's good people who are visiting the White House and in the Bush administration it was the other kind. The comfort...

"This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realized." -- Charles Lamb, letter to Thomas Manning

It was a tough week for the cigarette and all but the most heartless would fail to feel...

The wicked are wicked no doubt, and they go astray and they fall. . . but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do?
-- William Makepeace Thackeray The Newcomes

Two federal employees have been in the news recently. One is a federal judge,...

For slander lives upon succession,
Forever housed where it gets possession.
Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors

The worst thing about disclosure of the name of the new Supreme Court nominee was not that the weeks of speculation had come to an end. It was...