Cultivate the Heart Over the Head

The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.

Noah Webster (1788)

Personal Integrity and Public Order Are Necessary

According to the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, personal integrity and public order are a necessity and not a luxury for those who desire to build just, free, and stable human societies. To flout the will of God openly will therefore be the fast track to social and national failure for Western nations.

Os Guinness, Impossible People, pg.134

Truth or Helping Yourself?

When you want to help people, you tell them the truth.  When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.

Thomas Sowell

Heroes and Truth

A hero always tells the truth no matter what people think about him or what the consequences are.

“Ray Wincott,” on the movie Max

Are You A Slave?

The slave is the one who obeys a vicious master, which may all be the man’s own lusts.  The free man obeys God.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.133

Reviewing the Heart

What lies behind us and lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

When Thoughts Aren’t Controlled

The implications of controlling one’s thoughts are huge.  One arena of life in which much damage is caused by the secular position is that there are no bad thoughts in married life.  Mainstream magazines often quote therapists who encourage sexual fantasizing as harmless and at times even beneficial.  The truth is that male human nature being what it is, no real live woman, let alone a wife who has borne him a child or two, can possibly match up to the object of her husband’s fantasies.  Likewise, few middle-aged men would win the Mr. Olympia contest.  Why would anyone encourage husbands or wives to engage in behavior that can only make them less content in their marriage?

Children raised with no ability or desire to restrain their fantasies of sensual and material appetites are being condemned to a life of constant dissatisfaction.  Dissatisfaction regularly leads to resentment and then envy.  It is a short step from envy to a justification for taking what is not rightfully yours, or to exacerbating your problems by blaming them on anyone but yourself.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.253-254

We CAN Control Our Thoughts

Judeo-Christian principles insist that people have the ability to control not only their actions but even their thoughts.  And that, therefore, people are (and must be) accountable for their actions and thoughts. ...  While the modernist, particularly in the field of art, may consider unfettered and undisciplined thought to be just one step removed from genius, the Bible directs us to rein in our minds.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," pg.253

Be Careful of Even Little Decisions

Good and evil both increase at compound interest.  That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance.  The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.  An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, chapter 9

Stand By Your Convictions

When principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then battle is your calling, and peace has become sin; you must, at the price of dearest peace, lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy, with all the fire of your faith.

Abraham Kuyper

The Lover of Truth

The lover of truth must choose, in every way possible, to do and say what is right, even when threatened with death, rather than save his own life.

Justin Martyr, First Apology 2:1

Be Careful How You Live

I will govern my life and my thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one, and to read the other.  For what does it signify to make anything a secret to our neighbor, when to God, who is the searcher of hearts, all our privacies are open

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC - 65 AD)

The Weapon of the Mind

Hammer in Truth to the Point of Death

A man who knows that the earth is round but lives among men who believe it to be flat ought to hammer in his doctrine of the earth’s roundness up to the point of arrest, imprisonment, or even death.  Reality will confirm him, and he is not so much testifying to the world as it is—which is worth nothing—as to Him who made the world, and Who is worth more than all things.

Hilaire Belloc,  cited by George Grant, "Grand Illusions: The Legacy of Planned Parenthood," pg.291

Are You Intrepid Enough?

It is easier to find a score of men wise enough to discover the truth than to find one intrepid enough, in the face of opposition, to stand up for it.

Archibald Alexander Hodge, cited by Bill McKeever, 10/7/06, in a tribute to Jerald Tanner upon his death.

Integrity

Integrity may be the most precious possession I have, its violation my greatest loss.  Can I be trusted?  If not, all other virtues become uncertain.  Lack of integrity is a fault line in the character that jeopardizes all other values and undermines all relationships.

Robertson McQuilkin, An Introduction to Biblical Ethics, pg.381