Saturday, March 07, 2009

Quotes For Hard Choices

I believe that a culture unwilling to face hard choices is especially poor soil for Christian belief. In preparation for tomorrow's post on that - after church, gotta do that after church - I offer these quotes from people much more familiar with hard choices than I.

Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. [Yet] There may even be a [still] worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish, than live as slaves. - Winston Churchill, “The Gathering Storm.”
War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings, which thinks that nothing is worth war, is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing that is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature. One who has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. — John Stuart Mill
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains an unuprooted small corner of evil. It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person. ~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

1 comment:

ELC said...

"The probability that we may fall in the struggle ought not to deter us from the support of a cause we believe to be just; it shall not deter me. If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly and alone and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors. Here, without contemplating consequences, before High Heaven, and in the face of the world, I swear eternal fidelity to the just cause, as I deem it, of the land of my life, my liberty and my love. And who, that thinks with me, will not fearlessly adopt the oath that I take. Let none faulter, who thinks he is right, and we may succeed. But, if after all, we shall fail, be it so. We still shall have the proud consolation of saying to our consciences, and to the departed shade of our country's freedom, that the cause approved of our judgment, and adored of our hearts, in disaster, in chains, in torture, in death, we NEVER faultered in defending." (Abraham Lincoln, December 26, 1839)