About

Updated May 15, 2024

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.

Off on a Tangent is the online repository for all things related to Scott Bradford: fiction and nonfiction writing, photos, videos, software, jokes, and more. It started in 1995 and is now at version 26.0. It is built with WordPress.

Quotes

[During the Revolutionary War,] our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do.

Platonists, Gnostics[,] and Hindus all believe that the soul is better without the body than with it. They are wrong. A human soul without a body is not a complete self . . .

You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she still will hurry back.

As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame.

Judging God by human political categories is like judging a great symphony on which stanza of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ it most resembles.

It is at least as certain that God . . . exists as any demonstration in geometry can be.

Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe—through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence; it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations.

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed . . .

An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.

Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?

Socialism of any type leads to a total destruction of the human spirit and to a leveling of mankind into death.

Truth can never be confined to time and culture; in history it is known, but it also reaches beyond history.

Sometimes people fail to recognize and respect human rights because they have self-interested motives for doing so. In most cases of exploitation, for example, the fundamental failing is moral, not intellectual.

Evil can be eradicated from the world at large only when it is eradicated from the hearts and lives of individual human beings. Only when there is virtue in souls can there be peace and happiness in society.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

It does not undo harm to acknowledge that we have done it; but it undoes us not to acknowledge it.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.

Well-makers lead the water wherever they like; fletchers bend the arrow; carpenters bend a log of wood; good people fashion themselves.

Man, by making himself a god, discovers the painful agony that he is not God.

Public opinion was made or changed formerly by tribal chiefs, by kings, by religious leaders. Today the privilege of attempting to sway public opinion is everyone’s.

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