Children: If you are not prepared to raise them, don’t have them. If you do not enjoy them, don’t have them. If you are not ready to love them, don’t have them. You are much better off living without them.
Love is finding yourself in another person. Loneliness is the inability to do this. The deepest, most destructive and pathetic form of loneliness is atheism. Atheism is the inability to find yourself in anything but the material. I do not despise atheists; I pity them.
It is important to have animals near us. They are pure, innocent and without guile. They neither deceive nor do they have pretensions. They remind us how we should live. For this, we should love and respect them; and it follows, of course, that we must not abuse, torture, kill and eat them.
The Founders were right: Government is the greatest threat to personal liberty. Unless we do something radical and soon, we will have no personal liberty left – at least, none worth defending.
A friend recently said that the challenge we face is whether democracy can survive with deficits. I think he is correct. Excessive government spending – and the chronic inability of politicians to resist it – is undermining our democracy.
A recent poll indicates that the majority of Americans believe that the nation is in decline. They are correct; it is. I believe that this fact not only does not trouble the current administration; but, worse, that some members of the administration actually welcome it. They do not see America as an exceptional nation, in fact, they attack and deride the idea. Our decline suits their ideology and their world view; they prefer that America be one among many, rather than first among many.
It is absolutely essential for the future well-being of the nation that the present administration be defeated at the next election.
We have reached the point in our slide toward collectivism and centralized authority where the very suggestion that we should revert to our founding principles, that government should play the smallest possible role in the affairs of the citizens and that its power must be carefully proscribed, and to Lincoln’s dictum that the government should do nothing that the people can do better for themelves, is met with puzzlement, derision and bemusement. Yet doing so is the only way to resolve the current debt crisis, and to preserve our liberties and our birthright as Americans.
As Chekhov said: Above all, do good. As Tolstoy said: Kindness can be added to anything. Look for truth, not in a church or in religion or in vague metaphysics, but deep within yourself. For it resides there, as surely as you embody a spirit that breathes love and yearns for eternity.
The human soul is a being in exile. For a few moments, it inhabits a body, experiences the joys and sorrows of the world, finds love, suffers loss, learns, wonders, despairs, and deepens its nature thereby. But always it longs to return to that timeless essence of which it is a mirror. Remember: You are not sad or happy, not full or empty, not alone, fearful, nor doomed to die – You are eternal.
