Notes from an Old Card Catalog

As I continue my assault on getting organized, I keep finding things I'd forgotten I had. The other day I decided to examine several small boxes containing 3'x 5" note cards, the kind we used to use in high school and college when doing research for a paper.

One such box from four decades ago had a lot of notes about cults, with one of these quoting a writer as saying cults are the biggest threat to America today. It's been a long time since cults were front page news.

Here are some quotes that I found intriguing from this another batch of note cards.

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"People judge us by what they see--our actions, our means--not our intentions."--Jacques Ellul

"A people which no longer remembers has lost its history and its soul."--Aleksandr Sozhenitsyn

"There is a powerful tendency to move from the conviction that one knows the public good to the use of (force) power to impose that good."--Jeanne Kirkpatriick

"Within the last decade there have been many references from varied sources to the fact that the Western world stands on the verge of a spiritual rebirth, that is, a fundamental change of attitude toward the value of life."--Cary F. Baynes, translator's preface to Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)

Solipsism: the view that there is no reality outside of the self; all things relate solely to the experiences of the observer.

"A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises, but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence."--Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

"Three things are to be looked to in a building: that it stand on the right spot; that it be securely founded; that it be successfully executed."--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war and some are wounded, and some men never leave the country."--John F. Kennedy, March 21, 1962 press conference

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."--George Orwell, Animal Farm

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