—Fulton J. Sheen
Peace of Soul (1949)

The Cross of Christ does something for us that we cannot do for ourselves. Everywhere else in the world we are spectators; but, facing the vision of the Cross, we pass from spectatorship to participation. If anyone thinks that the confession of his guilt is escapism, let him try once kneeling at the foot of the Crucifix. He cannot escape feeling involved. One look at Christ on the Cross, and the scab is torn from the ulcerous depths of sin as it stands revealed in all of its ugliness. Just one flash of that Light of the World shatters all the blindness that sins have begotten and burns into the soul the truth of our relationship to God. Those who have refused to go to Calvary are those who do not weep for their sins. Once a soul has gone there, it can no longer say that sin does not matter.

—Fulton J. Sheen
Peace of Soul (1949)

Regardless of whether one thinks industrialization is fundamentally a good thing or not, it has certainly been a spectacular achievement of human ingenuity and energy, and most of us—most people who will read this—live in abundance and comfort because of it. And yet we have a tendency to treat the wealth it produces as something akin to a natural resource, something that just appeared spontaneously and requires no effort to preserve, leaving us only the question of how to distribute it. It’s worthwhile to be reminded that it was the product of intelligence and an enormous amount of hard work.

—Maclin Horton
“Ayn Rand, Crank,” from his blog, Light on Dark Water (Aug. 3, 2008)

—Marilynne Robinson
excerpt from Salmagundi, No. 101–102 (Winter–Spring 1994)

What a frail and fragile thing is human life! A bullet passes through the living flesh and it ceases to live. But a bullet cannot kill the soul; one knows, most assuredly, that the Spirit—God’s breath in man—returns to God Who gave it. Oh! one must believe and trust in God’s mercy, otherwise these frightful sights would work havoc with one’s brain; and one’s heart would faint with the depth of its despair.

—Florence Farmborough
With the Armies of the Tsar: A Nurse at the Russian Front 1914–1918 (1974)