“When the healthy pursuit of self-interest and self-realization turns into self-absorption, other people can lose their intrinsic value in our eyes and become mere means to the fulfillment of our needs and desires.”
P. M. Forni,
Choosing Civility
"I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."
G. M. Gilbert,
Nuremberg Diary
"This is how we know who are the children of God and who are the children of the Satan: anyone who does not do what is good is not God’s child, nor is anyone who does not love their neighbor."
1 John 3:10
"The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to appear disguised as light, charity, historical necessity, or social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethical concepts, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Bible, it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil."
Dietrich Bonhoeffer,
Ten Years After, 1943
"They which play with the devil’s rattles will be brought by degrees to wield his sword."
Thomas Fuller,
The Profane State, 1642
"Help me, Lord, that my eyes may see all with mercy, so that I may never suspect or judge from appearances, but look deeper for what is good and beautiful in others' souls, and then come to their aid. He who refuses to pass through the door of My mercy must pass through the door of My justice. "
Maria Faustyna Kowalska
Markets were diving this morning, in the kind of kabuki theater we have come to expect on major stock option expiration events.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Stocks managed to gain back most of their intraday losses..
VIX rose sharply and then dropped back down.
Gold and silver were just hammered in the futures, but again, managed to take back their early declines and finished in the green.
The Dollar chopped sideways.
All eyes will be on the Federal Reserve meeting on Wednesday September 21st.
Serve whom you will. But know whom it is that you serve.
“The greatest evil is not done now in sordid dens of crime. It is not even done in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices by quiet men, with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks, who do not need to raise their voice.”
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
Have a pleasant weekend.
