Children's Encyclopedia
A few weeks ago Lori (who helps out with our youth group) was showing me a sort of "Children's Encyclopedia" which her son Maxwell was reading. It was an interesting little book; I think I would have enjoyed reading it cover to cover, and could have learned a lot from it, even though it was an encyclopedia for children!One page that caught my attention was a page devoted to presidential quotations. For every US president, his "most famous" quotation was given. I sat and read through them all; they were not just interesting, but also very revealing about the character of the man.
And I noticed a trend that bothered me a bit: the most "profound" quotations--the ones that showed the most insight into human character and responsibility--these statements were made by our earliest presidents. As time passed, the statements seemed to become less and less profound, less and less "insightful".
I found that a bit disturbing. I commented on that to Lori, and she said she'd noticed the same thing.
Anyway, I thought of that again yesterday, because I've been working on my Quote Puzzler Online Competition. Specifically, I've been going back through every single quotation on the site, and preparaing the pages for search engines. In the process I noticed a very similar trend:
If a quotation is about human responsibility, character, moral obligation, virtue or ethics, it is almost certain that the quote was not made in the last 50 years...probably not in the last century.
I thought this was a bit disturbing, yet at the same time it seemed to correlate with what we'd noticed about the presidential quotes. And it made me think of a Bible verse. And whether you believe the Bible or not, this is a verse that it would be terribly difficult to argue with:
II Timothy 4:3
For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.
I think that's a very apt description of our age. We have exchanged truth for cleverness, and responsibility for amusement.
Posted On Jun 5, 2005 at 4:38 AM
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