And seeing that it was almost morningI too began to depart when I heardEver so faintly the whole of the thing:The water and the wind roving northwardAnd the muffled motions of the cityChoiring in an inhuman counterpointSo indescribably strange-yet-welcomeAnd full of free gloryThat as I strained to hear these songs conjointThe sun arose and I was overcome.(From "Ode to the Potomac")

Secular faith is sensible insofar as it is explicable, but religious faith by being inexplicable demonstrates its absolute sensibility.

The Greeks produced lively portraits and the aesthetes living ones, but perhaps we will be the first generation to wholly abandon the portrait in favor of life itself.

Secular life, like an unfertilized egg, is ever-pregnant with a strange hollowness.

Little stirs people to write as much as death’s approach.

We're forgetting each plant's proper naming,Classifications we've learnt from reading;We stop recalling the links and logic,Accounts of the world's internal working,And I wonder—do you hear strange music?

Early on in our national development, we were a nation of open frontiers, a giant ocean-to-ocean project to root the rarified ideals of the Enlightenment in real soil. Today, there are no more uncharted territories for the descendants of Lewis and Clark to explore. Our maps are detailed and our borders defined.

In a capitalist economy such as ours, money is the fuel of freedom. To take so much of it away from taxpayers to fund military bloat, which is neither necessary nor beneficial, is to not only deprive them of some good or service, but to deprive them of their choice, which is the essence of liberty.

But as soldiers sometimes go on in spite of their own understanding, so do we and as we do, like soldiers, we look upon the dead and wonder at the meaning of it all.

To make America’s least employable citizens dependent on the whims of the state, rather than their neighbors, is to clear a path for demagogues.