Tom Faletti
September 26, 2025
This collection is a work in progress.
Quotes on issues of faith, life, truth, and justice.
FAITH
There are no ordinary people
“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”
– C.S. Lewis. The Weight of Glory. 1941.
LIFE
Measure your performance by how much better you made the people around you
“The most important measure of how good a game I’d played was how much better I’d made my teammates play.”
– Bill Russell. Inscription engraved on a block that stands with a statue of Mr. Russell at Boston’s City Hall Plaza
See John Hareas. “City of Boston celebrates Bill Russell: Player, activist, mentor.” NBA.com, 1 Nov. 2013, https://www.nba.com/news/bill-russell-city-of-boston.
Recover from your mistakes
“If you stumble, make it into a dance.”
– Inside a Dove candy wrapper
TRUTH
Read old books
“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. . . . Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”
– C. S. Lewis. “Introduction” to On The Incarnation, a translation of Athanasius’s On the Incarnation of the Word of God. Translated by Sister Penelope Lawson, a nun in the order of the Convent of the Community of St. Mary the Virgin. Originally published in 1944. Current edition published by GLH Publishing, Louisville, KY, 2018, pp. 2-3. (Italics are in the original; boldface added. In the original publication, the translator was listed as “A Religious of C.S.M.V.” Athanasius’s treatise was written prior to A.D. 319.)
JUSTICE
Justice, injustice, and democracy
“Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”
– Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971). In the foreword to The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense. 1944. University of Chicago Press, 2011, p. xi. (See Joseph E. Hartman. “Democracy and Sin: Doing Justice to Reinhold Niebuhr.” Academic Questions. Fall 2015. National Association of Scholars. https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/28/3/democracy_and_sin_doing_justice_to_reinhold_niebuhr#_ftnref27.) (For clarity in the 21st century, the quote is often rendered: “[Humanity’s] capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but [humanity’s] inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”)
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