Quotes

“How often we wish that God would show himself stronger, that he would strike decisively, defeating evil and creating a better world. All ideologies of power justify themselves in exactly this way; they justify the destruction of whatever would stand in the way of progress and the liberation of humanity. We suffer on account of God’s patience. And yet, we need his patience.”

“The world is redeemed by the patience of God. It is destroyed by the impatience of human beings.”

–Pope Benedict XVI

Liberty is not license.
–Mike Rockers

Even if we want it to be.

How much success has been withheld from the creative by mountains of red tape.

Making a programmer use Visual Basic is like making a computer graphics designer use MSPaint
–anonymous

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
–H. L. Mencken

Every man is my equal, my master, my slave. If mankind remembers some the greater it is only by the results of their actions; and not by grandeur of their intentions.

“Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossiblity in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple.”
–Babbage

As said with regard to his Analytical Engine, thus becoming the world’s first programmer.

Faith is the realization of what is hoped for and evidence of things not seen.
–Hebrews 11:1

When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. …something is always created too. And instead of just dwelling on what is killed it’s important also to see what’s created and to see the process as a kind of death-birth continuity that is neither good nor bad, but just is.
–Phaedrus Reborn, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”

But in reality Justice was such as we were describing, being concerned however, not with the outward man, but with the inward, which is the true self and concernment of man: for the just man does not permit the several elements within him to interfere with one another, or any of them to do the work of others,-he sets in order his own inner life, and is his own master and his own law, and at peace with himself; and when he has bound together the three principles within him, which maybe compared to the higher, lower, and middle notes of the scale, and the intermediate intervals-when he has bound all these together, and is no longer many, but has become one entirely temperate and perfectly adjusted nature, then he proceeds to act, if he has to act, whether in a matter of property, or in the treatment of the body, or in some affair of politics or, private business; always thinking and calling that which preserves and cooperates with the harmonious condition, just and good action and the knowledge which presides over it, wisdom, and that which at any time impairs this condition, he will call unjust action and the opinion which presides over it ignorance.
–Socrates, The Republic