Michel de Montaigne
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"There is no man so good, who, were he to submit all his thoughts and actions to the laws, would not deserve hanging ten times in his life." Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592) (Alan: Those who think otherwise, deserve hanging twenty times over.)
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."
“There is also the Territory of historical self-righteousness: if we had lived south of Ohio in 1830, we would not have owned slaves; if we had lived on the frontier, we would have killed no Indians, violated no treaties, stolen no land. The probability is overwhelming that if we had belonged to the generation we deplore, we too would have behaved deplorably. The probability is overwhelming that we belong to a generation that will be found by its successors to have behaved deplorably. Not to know that is, again, to be in error and to neglect essential work, and some of this work, as before, is work of the imagination. How can we imagine our situation or our history if we think we are superior to it?”
Wendell Berry
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.”
Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander by Thomas Merton
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/12/thomas-merton-quotations.html
http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/12/thomas-merton-quotations.html