In Praise of Virtue

[Nicholas Weeks]

The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism or unlimited sovereignty or absolute power is the same in a majority of a popular assembly, an aristocratical council, an oligarchical junto, and a single emperor — equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody and in every respect diabolical.

John Adams: Letter to Thomas Jefferson (13 November, 1815)

[Nicholas Weeks]

Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.

Burke: Letter to a member of the National Assembly.

[Nicholas Weeks]

Such legislation [against private property] may have a specious appearance of benevolence; men readily listen to it, and are easily induced to believe that in some wonderful manner everybody will become everybody's friend, especially when someone is heard denouncing the evils now existing in states, ... which are said to arise out of the possession of private property. These evils, however, are due to a very different cause — the wickedness of human nature.

Aristotle: Politics, 1263b, 11.

[Nicholas Weeks]

Life is short and we have not too much time for gladdening the hearts of those who are traveling the dark way with us. Oh, be swift to love! Make haste to be kind!

Henri F. Amiel

[Nicholas Weeks]

Every time we turn our heads the other way when we see the law flouted, when we tolerate what we know to be wrong, when we close our eyes and ears to the corrupt because we are too busy or too frightened, when we fail to speak up and speak out, we strike a blow against freedom and decency and justice.

Robert Kennedy

[Nicholas Weeks]

A worldling can easily be known from the way in which he dislikes matters religious. He objects to the chanting of the name of the Lord and to listening to the singing of His glory. He prevents the others from taking to the path of religion. Religious institutions are condemned by him. He openly ridicules the holy men and the holy orders. Such behaviour is the mark of the man steeped in worldliness.

Sri Ramakrishna

[Nicholas Weeks]

Genuine morality is preserved only in the school of adversity, and a state of continuous prosperity may easily prove a quicksand to virtue.

Schiller (d. 1805)

[Nicholas Weeks]

What can laws do without morals?

B. Franklin.

[Nicholas Weeks]

To make Buddhism expand and flourish, you must take a loss in situations where most people are unable to. You must endure the insults that ordinary people find unendurable. Expand the measure of your minds, and be true in your actions. When you are not trying to be true, the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are aware of it. No one can cheat them. Each of you should examine your own faults and earnestly correct the flaws in your character. Truly recognize where in the past you have been upside-down and where your behavior has departed from principle. Be honest, forget about yourself, and work for the sake of all of Buddhism and all of society.

Master Hsuan Hua

[Nicholas Weeks]

The greed of the world is the death of the world. The man whose mind is occupied with trying to get control of others, that he may stand before the public as powerful and prosperous - that man is, from his soul's standpoint, in his death-throes.

Katherine Tingley (d. 1929)

[Nicholas Weeks]

Human reason is a very convenient and accommodating
instrument and works only in the circle set for it by interest,
partiality and prejudice. The politicians reason wrongly or insincerely
and have power to enforce the results of their reasoning, so
make a mess of the world’s affairs,—the intellectuals reason and
see what their minds show them, which is far from being always
the truth, for it is generally decided by intellectual preference
and the mind’s inborn or education-inculcated angle of vision,
—but even when they see it, they have no power to enforce it.
So between blind power and seeing impotence the world moves,
achieving destiny through a mental muddle.

Aurobindo

[Nicholas Weeks]

The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have been governing us for some time.

Alisdair MacIntyre

[Nicholas Weeks]

The Jina cannot be known.
He cannot be measured by any measure.
The Buddha has unimpeded knowledge.
He has transcended the path of words.

Gaṇḍavyūha Sutra, chapter one.

[Nicholas Weeks]

Such is the nature of true social justice, [Orestes] Brownson declares: not the selfish loneliness of the Benthamite philosophy, nor the mean equality of the Socialists, but a liberation of every man, under God, to do the best that is in him. Poverty is no evil, in itself; obscurity is no evil; labor is no evil; even physical pain may be no evil, as it was no evil to the martyrs. This world is a place of trial and struggle, so that we may find our higher nature in right response to challenge.
To the Socialist, says Brownson, poverty, obscurity, and physical suffering are positive evils, because the Socialist does not perceive that these challenges are put into the world to save us from apathy and sloth and indifference. The Socialist would condemn humanity to a condition of permanent injustice, in which no man could hope for what is his due, the right to exercise his talents given him by God; the Socialist would keep us all in perpetual childhood.

Excerpt From: The Essential Russell Kirk.

[Nicholas Weeks]

Measuring a thing is a crude act, which cannot be applied in any other way than extremely imperfectly to living bodies.

Johann Goethe