Hart Foundation Quotes

Know where you wanna go. Then get there. Start with small goals and they'll build your foundation for the bigger ones.

Mechanized warfare still left room for human qualities to play an important part in the issue. ‘Automatic warfare’ cancels them out, except in a passive form. Archidamus is at last being justified. Courage, skill and patriotism become shrinking assets. The most virile nation might not be able to withstand another, inferior to it in all natural qualities, if the latter had some decisively superior technical appliance. (...)The advent of ‘automatic warfare’ should make plain the absurdity of warfare as a means of deciding nations’ claims to superiority. It blows away romantic vapourings about the heroic virtues of war, utilized by aggressive and ambitious leaders to generate a military spirit among their people. They can no longer claim that war is any test of a people’s fitness, or even of its national strength. Science has undermined the foundations of nationalism, at the very time when the spirit of nationalism is most rampant.

It is only because a dreamer has temporarily lost the desire to turn his eyes toward more distant horizons that he believes he inhabits a reality perfectly complete in itself, in need of no further explanation. He does not see that this secondary world rests upon no foundations, has no larger story, and persists as an apparent unity only so long as he has forgotten how to question its curious omissions and contradictions.

Hell appears in the shadow of the cross as what has always already been conquered, as what Easter leaves in ruins, to which we may flee from the transfiguring light of God if we so wish, but where we can never finally come to rest—for, being only a shadow, it provides nothing to cling to (as Gregory of Nyssa so acutely observes). Hell exists, so long as it exists, only as the last terrible residue of a fallen creation’s enmity to God, the lingering effects of a condition of slavery that God has conquered universally in Christ and will ultimately conquer individually in every soul. This age has passed away already, however long it lingers on in its own aftermath, and thus in the Age to come, and beyond all ages, all shall come home to the Kingdom prepared for them from before the foundation of the world.

All reasoning presumes premises or intuitions or ultimate convictions that cannot be proved by any foundations or facts more basic than themselves, and hence there are irreducible convictions present wherever one attempts to apply logic to experience. One always operates within boundaries established by one’s first principles, and asks only the questions that those principles permit.

The morning after never looks anywhere near as beautiful as the night before. Sometimes, it’s downright ugly. Because you can finally see everything. The cracks in the foundation. The shattered pieces. The old scars. The fresh wounds. The bloodshed. The carnage. And trust me, hearts don’t break without carnage. A lot of freakin’ carnage. And you just want to run. Because you don’t want to look… But it’s the only way that you can assess the damage.

Hell exists, so long as it exists, only as the last terrible residue of a fallen creation’s enmity to God, the lingering effects of a condition of slavery that God has conquered universally in Christ and will ultimately conquer individually in every soul. This age has passed away already, however long it lingers on in its own aftermath, and thus in the Age to come, and beyond all ages, all shall come home to the Kingdom prepared for them from before the foundation of the world.

The philosopher John Locke once noted that pursuing happiness is “the foundation of liberty.”1 This idea is at the core of the Declaration of Independence, the document that gave birth to our nation.

I bet she’d want to tell them every day that their mind is their own, that their observations and beliefs are valid, that the things grownups try shamelessly to pass off as facts and rules and foundations of stone are in fact as ephemeral as air. Subjective beliefs. Shaky social constructs. I bet she’d teach them to nurture their own worldview and to accept those of everyone around them without feeling threatened.

The great project of "modernity" (the search for comprehensive metanarratives and epistemological foundations by way of a neutral and unaided rationality, available to all reflective intellects, and independent of cultural and linguistic conditions) has surely foundered;

The room darkened as the movie screen burst into a sea of silver light, swirling with a howl that shook the very foundation of the theater. A scream rose in Nikki's throat as the walls shook, cracking and crumbling all around them. She shielded her eyes as that pale light grew ever brighter, ever closer to her, so close now that she could see a myriad of colors buried beneath it. They sparked and writhed like electric serpents with golden sunbursts for heads, devoured and spat out by the maelstrom again and again as it undulated toward her.

In the end, one is of course perfectly free to believe in the, so to speak, “just-there-ness” of the quantum order and of the physical laws governing it. I tend to see this as bordering upon a belief in magic, but that may be mere prejudice. What is absolutely certain is that the naturalist view of things is, as I have said, just a picture of the world, not a truth about the world that we can know, nor even a conviction that rests upon a secure rational foundation. The picture that naturalism gives us, at least at present, is twofold. On the one hand, the cosmos of space and time is a purely mechanistic reality that, if we are to be perfectly consistent, we must see as utterly deterministic: that is to say, to work a small variation on Laplace’s fantasy, if we could know the entire history of the physical events that compose the universe, from that first inflationary instant to the present, including the course of every particle, we would know also the ineluctable necessity of everything that led to and follows from the present; even what we take to be free acts of the will would be revealed as the inevitable results of physical forces reaching all the way back to the beginning of all things. On the other hand, this deterministic machine floats upon a quantum flux of ceaseless spontaneity and infinite indeterminacy. Together, these two orders close reality within a dialectical totality—a perfect union of destiny and chance, absolute determinism and pure fortuity—hermetically sealed against all transcendence. And yet, once again, the picture is radically incomplete, not only because it is unlikely that the classical Newtonian universe and the universe of quantum theory can be fitted together so seamlessly, but because neither level of reality explains the existence of the other, or of itself. And, also once again, nothing we know obliges us to find this picture more convincing than one in which higher causes (among which we might, for instance, include free will) operate upon lower, or in which all physical reality is open to a transcendent order that reveals itself in the very existence of nature.

The reason that today’s cultured despisers of religion tend to employ such extraordinarily bad arguments for their prejudices, without realizing how bad those arguments are, is that they are driven by the precritical and irrational impulses of the purest kind of fideism. At the deepest level of their thoughts and desires, they are obedient to principles and promptings that rest upon no foundation but themselves.

The real connection between drugs and violent crime lies in the profits to be made in the drug trade. The stereotype is that crack typically causes crime by turning people into violent predators. But evidence from research shattered this misconception. A key study examined all the homicides in New York City in 1988, a year when 76 percent of arrestees tested positive for cocaine. Nearly two thousand killings were studied.4 Nearly half of these homicides were not related to drugs at all. Of the rest, only 2 percent involved addicts killing people while seeking to buy crack cocaine and just 1 percent of murders involved people who had recently used the drug. Keep in mind that this study was conducted in a year when the media was filled with stories warning about “crack-crazed” addicts. Thirty-nine percent of New York City’s murders that year did involve the drug trade, however, and most of these were related to crack selling. But these killings were primarily disputes over sales territories or robberies of dealers by other dealers. In other words, they were as “crack-related” as the shoot-outs between gangsters during Prohibition were “alcohol-related.” The idea that crack cocaine turns previously nonviolent users into maniacal murderers is simply not supported by the data. When it comes to drugs, most people have beliefs that have no foundation in evidence.

What is absolutely certain is that the naturalist view of things is, as I have said, just a picture of the world, not a truth about the world that we can know, nor even a conviction that rests upon a secure rational foundation.