He would later describe Margaret as “a toad, which I would not injure, but cannot help beholding with abhorrence.”

If people like your buddy up there would seriously try to dismantle the constitution and cancel people’s basic freedoms and liberties in exchange for communism, I would be fine with your buddy with his Pikachu avatar being executed by a federal court.  I would applaud said execution, in fact, because that’s a completely acceptable punishment for traitors who try usurp democracy and liberty.

The occupational hazard of the literary intellectual is to believed that he is redeemed by consciousness.  He knows, for example, what mean-spiritedness is, and he is, of course, against it; therefore, he need have no further worries about falling into it himself.  He is opposed to all the vices and in favor of all the virtues; and this, of course, makes him a righteous man without further ado.

(Norman Podhoretz, Making It)

(this book is great, it’s a shame he became a neocon)

His mind had to be clear in order to successfully maneuver the Byzantine contractual obligations that he had brought on himself through deals with various devils, demons, and necromancers.

To her right, a male drinks lustfully from an organic vessel. 

Heath is worried about the reenchantment of the world by “malware of the mind,” ancient viruses of religion and mysticism now ramped up in power and sped by new media.

Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals.  […] The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence.

[…]

This story of man’s passage from religious or philosophical transcendentalism has been told many times, and, since it has usually been told as a story of progress, it is extremely difficult today to get people in any number to see contrary implications. […] Thus in the face of the enormous brutality of our age we seem unable to make appropriate response to perversions of truth and acts of bestiality. Multiplying instances show complacency in the presence of contradiction which denies the heritage of Greece, and a callousness to suffering which denies the spirit of Christianity.

[…]

And we can say of one as of the other that the action must be within bounds of reason if our feeling toward it is to be informed and proportioned, which is a way of saying, if it is to be just. The philosophically ignorant vitiate their own actions by failing to observe measure.

(Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences; my emphasis)

Given to the study of books as a child, Charles [de Blois, 1319-1364] was an ascetic of exaggerated piety who sought spirituality by mortifying the flesh. Like Thomas à Becket, he wore unwashed clothes crawling with lice; he put pebbles in his shoes, slept on straw on the floor next to his wife’s bed, and after his death was found to have worn a coarse shirt of horsehair under his armor, and cords wound so tightly around his body that the knots dug into his flesh. By these practices a seeker of holiness expressed contempt for the world, self-abasement, and humility, although he often found himself guilty of a perverse pride in his excesses. Charles confessed every night so that he might not go to sleep in a state of sin. He fathered a bastard son called Jehan de Blois, but sins of the flesh did not have to be eschewed, only repented. […] Such was his reputation for saintliness that when he undertook to walk barefoot in the when he undertook to walk barefoot in the snow to a Breton shrine, the people covered his path with straw and blankets, but he took another way at a cost of bleeding and frozen feet, so that for weeks afterward he was unable to walk.

His piety detracted not at all from his ferocious pursuit of the dukedom. He stated his claim below the walls of Nantes by having his siege engines hurl into the city the heads of thirty captured partisans of Montfort. His successful siege of Quimper was followed by a ruthless massacre of 2,000 civilian inhabitants of all ages and both sexes.

(Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century; my emphasis)

In the dazzling sparkle of the verbiage, how can it matter that Aguirre believes that “to ardor” is a verb, or that he can describe glee as “maladorous” [again, sic]? It doesn’t matter at all!

Cruz has started oozing the same unwholesome “heroism,” having been forced for months to play bottom banana to Trump’s top, while obviously viewing him as “a serpents egg/ which hatch’d, would, as his kind, grow mischievous.”

Aristotle believed <need more here, with citations>, and influenced Christian thinkers like Boethius.