I'm not a knee-jerk conservative. I passionately believe in free markets and less government but not to the point of being a libertarian.
Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of man will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.
This battle for 'common-sense' gun control laws pits emotion and passion against logic and reason. All too often in such a contest logic loses. So expect more meaningless if not harmful 'gun control' legislation. Good news - if you're a crook.
It is a fact often observed that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion who cannot write well under other circumstances.
Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principles which direct them.
Man is born passionate of body but with an innate though secret tendency to the love of Good in his main-spring of Mind. But God help us all! It is at present a sad jar of atoms.
Out of chaos God made a world and out of high passions comes a people.
One needs occasionally to stand aside from the hum and rush of human interests and passions to hear the voices of God.
A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time at all times who suffers harm done to others whose greatest passion is compassion whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.
If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.
A vow is a purely religious act which cannot be taken in a fit of passion. It can be taken only with a mind purified and composed and with God as witness.
My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide: a microcosm of a just and beautiful society.
We can choose between the future and the past between reason and ignorance between true compassion and mere ideology.
The future will belong to those who have passion and are willing to work hard to make our country better.
In love unlike most other passions the recollection of what you have had and lost is always better than what you can hope for in the future.
When the people become involved in their government government becomes more accountable and our society is stronger more compassionate and better prepared for the challenges of the future.
Our human compassion binds us the one to the other - not in pity or patronizingly but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.