Jonathan V. Last Quotes

#1. Anyone can dig a ditch. There's no way to dig smarter. Or dig faster. Having a baby is like being assigned to dig a ditch. That goes all the way to the horizon.

Jonathan V. Last

#2. One of the mitigating benefits of children is that they make a Lego habit more respectable.

Jonathan V. Last

#3. Virtues are the internal qualities that allow us to be our best selves and enable us to lead complete and fulfilling lives.

Jonathan V. Last

#4. If you do believe in God, and your first instinct in all things must be gratitude: for creation, or love, for mercy.

Jonathan V. Last

#5. When the worry about the baby crying ceases, the worry about the baby not breathing begins.

Jonathan V. Last

#6. A man with no children can easily be lulled into a sense that time is standing still. It's not. It's marching past us, relentlessly. Having a child growing and changing before your eyes makes this unavoidably clear.

Jonathan V. Last

#7. The modern university is the institution through which the next generation's elite is formed. It inculcates the two essential, nonnegotiable principles of the American ruling class: consumerism and relativism.

Jonathan V. Last

#8. Justice is something people do to other people, and if there's one thing we've learned from history, it's that most things people do to other people aren't very nice.

Jonathan V. Last

#9. To raise a child is to submit to a staggering amount of work, much of which is deeply unpleasant. It would be crazy to have children if they weren't so damned important.

Jonathan V. Last

#10. Since the late 1970s, 163 million female babies have been aborted by parents seeking sons.

Jonathan V. Last

#11. Believe it or not, philosophy has consequences.

Jonathan V. Last

#12. Justice is the virtue we 'd rather have done unto others than practiced on ourselves.

Jonathan V. Last

#13. Above all, if we'd only acknowledge that all of us are mistaken from time to time, then we'd be more willing to forgive others in the hopes they will extend the same measure of charity to us.

Jonathan V. Last

#14. It's evident to anyone paying attention that zero tolerance equals 100 percent stupidity. But you have to understand that zero-tolerance rules aren't about protecting kids. They exist to protect the adults who are too cowardly to make judgments.

Jonathan V. Last

#15. Aquinas called prudence the queen of virtues, saying that she gently guides all the rest.

Jonathan V. Last

#16. Appearing in Mummy and Daddy's room in the middle of the night and claiming to be "scared" is strictly verboten.

Jonathan V. Last

#17. No single virtue is, on its own, necessarily virtuous.

Jonathan V. Last

#18. I wasn't interested in becoming a man. I was interested in becoming a more dashing, brilliant, charismatic, mysterious, attractive-to-girls version of what my suburban, television-age upbringing had turned me into - which was basically a collection of appetites.

Jonathan V. Last

#19. Aristotle deemed courage to be the first virtue, because it makes all the other possible.

Jonathan V. Last