Peter C. Brownell Quotes

The new mayor has no intention of discriminating against anyone. I think the issue relative to the personnel policy has been settled by the City Council. It is not my intention to try to reverse or overturn that policy.

We must candidly admit that we have created a 'dark age' to feel superior to the past.

Having supported the relationship between the visible and the invisible, between the inexpressible internal world and its significant manifestation in the external world, having asserted that the soul was able to give meaning to natural things: this was the service rendered by Plotinus to his contemporaries and successors. (Part One, chapter II, p. 59)

Benedict XVI is right when he says that the West has "become Christian". The equation "Christian=Western", historically, is blasphemy.

In this particular job, I'd like to see myself as a community servant. This is not a profession. I don not view myself as a professional politician. I characterize myself as someone who's just doing a period of community service in my life here. Longer than two years, but less than a lifetime.

We Europeans have guiltily built the fracture between Europe and Islam, while instead the roots of these two worlds have been intertwined for a millennium.

The "golden age" is the exception, normal history is "grey".

Plotinus he had attempted to deepen his knowledge of the exotic philosophy of the Persians and Indians. Only later in life did he indulge, with ever greater tranquility, in Plato's ancient dialectics. The appeal of his writings comes from being the work of a troubled and anxious man who found his way through harsh, rational discipline and achieved calm and clarity in adulthood. (Part 1, chapter II, p. 57)

McCain is a man of principle, integrity and courage, and has the skills and leadership qualities to lead our country and restore dignity to the office of the president of the United States.

800 miles south of the Byzantine frontier, in Mecca, a city of the Hejaz, a middle-aged man, after a mediocre career as a merchant, began wandering disconsolately among the sinister hills outside the city. In C.E.610, this man, Muhammad, began to have visions. He narrated these visions in metrical form and constituted his Qur'an, "recitation". Strengthened by these experiences he gathered a community around himself: the Umma, the "people of Allah". Within twenty years Muhammad and his Umma had established themselves as rulers of Mecca and nearby Medina, and as the main party of the Arabian Peninsula. (Part 2, chapter III, p. 155)

[...] the model of Charlemagne's renewed Roman empire was not Augustus, but Justinian, the devout Catholic depicted in the mosaics of San Vitale. Justinian was the direct, if inadvertent, ancestor of the idea that a "Christian republic", a Holy Roman Empire, would always exist in Western Europe to serve the interests of the papacy and to ensure the libertas of the Catholic church . (Part 2, chapter I, p. 108)

The «Hellenes» amaze us because, although open to the spiritual disturbances of their age, they turned to ancient methods to find a solution to the anxieties of the present. Their placid faith in a tradition stemming from Plato and continually evolving was perhaps the most reassuring aspect of late ancient civilization. In fact, many classical and enlightened societies had collapsed under the weight of their own traditionalism, leaving immediate successors only a memory of anxieties and nightmares. If this did not happen in the Roman Empire, it was largely due to the "Hellenic Renaissance" and the dialogue between its proponents and the new Christian aristocratic intellectuals. (Part 1, chapter II, pp. 56-57)