The fasces a symbol of "popular revolution" and "liberal governance", among, of course, other things

"But his analysis also shows just how crucial historical knowledge and social context are for the interpretation of such objects.  There is, we are told, 'nothing "fascist" about the fasces' in Daniel Chester French's statue of Lincoln (1922), where the President is shown leaning on them.  Brennen reveals that any attempt to erase the symbol from our present would require 'dismantling a good bit of the US Capitol . . . and countless other public structures and monuments nationwide'.
     ". . . The fasces have been around for more than 2,700 years.  They have been the symbol of the power of kings and consuls, but have also formed an integral part of the symbolism of popular revolution, liberal governance, fascist dictatorship and, more recently, the bigoted world-view of the far-right.  Interpretation is always historically and socially contingent.  T. Corey Brennan's long history of the fasces reminds us that there is a time and place for symbol-smashing, but also that if we attempt to erase such symbols we risk caricaturing them, forgetting the nuance of their historical reality and ultimately ceding their unquestionable power to those who would use them to promote hate-filled ideologies."

     Henry Stead, "Rod's for history's back:  There is more to the fasces than Mussolini's misappropriation," Times literary supplement no. ____ (June 30, 2023): 13 (13).

for I am mindful of my price, worth, or value

Thyssen-Bornemisza
Collection

"Let not the proud disparage me, for I am mindful of my ransom. I eat it, I drink it, I dispense it to others, and as a poor man I long to be filled with it among those who are fed and feasted."

"non calumnientur mihi superbi, quoniam cogito pretium meum et manduco et bibo et erogo et pauper cupio saturari ex eo inter illos, qui edunt et saturantur. . . ."

     St. Augustine, Confessions 10.(43.)70, trans. Liturgy of the hours (Universalis).  CCL 27, as reproduced in Past Masters, does not appear to flag "Let not the proud disparage me" as a biblical quotation, but Ps 118:122 does read, in the Vulgata iuxta LXX, "non calumnientur me superbi", and in the Vulgata iuxta Hebraicum, "ne calumnientur me superbi."  For the O'Donnell commentary on this passage, go here.

"had he not become flesh and made his dwelling among us"

"We might have despaired of ourselves, thinking your Word remote from any conjunction with mankind, had he not become flesh and made his dwelling among us."

"potuimus putare uerbum tuum remotum esse a coniunctione hominis et desperare de nobis, nisi caro fieret et habitaret in nobis."

St. Augustine, Confessions 10.(43.)69, trans. Liturgy of the hours (Universalis).

"do not suppose that because the righteous were in the midst of men it was among men that they had achieved their righteousness"

"ever since the transgression came to pass [(facta prævaricatióne præcepti)], the soul cannot know [(non posse . . . cognoscere)] God unless it withdraws itself from men and from every distraction. . . ."
     "This is why the holy fathers also withdrew into the desert alone, men such as Elijah the Tishbite and John the Baptist. For do not suppose that because the righteous were in the midst of men it was among men that they had achieved their righteousness. Rather, having first practised much quiet [(magno . . . silentio)], they then received the power of God dwelling in them, and then God sent them into the midst of men, having acquired every virtue, so that they might act as God’s provisioners and cure men of their infirmities."

     St. Ammonius, Epistle 12.1-2, Office of readings, Feast of St. Charbel Makhlouf, 24 July, trans. Universalis, where there is more of value.  For the Syriac, see Patrologia Orientalis 10.6 (1973 [1913]), Ammonii Eremitae epistulae Syriace, ed. Kmoskó, 603-604.  More from secs. 4-5 (606-607):

     See, beloved, I have made known to you the power of quiet, and how it heals on all sides, and how God wills it. That is why I have written to you, that you may be strengthened in what you are doing, and know that it is in quiet that all the saints grew, and for this reason the divine power came to dwell in them, and made known to them heavenly mysteries; thus they drove away all the oldness of this world [(totam vetustatem mundi huius)]. And he who is writing this to you has by means of it attained to this measure.

     Many monks at the present time have been unable to persevere in quiet because they could not overcome their self-will. For this reason they live among men all the time, since they are unable to despise themselves and flee from the company of men, or to engage in battle. Thus they abandon quiet, and remain in the company of their neighbours, receiving their comfort thereby, all their lives. Therefore they have not been held worthy of the divine sweetness, or to have the power dwelling within them. For when that power looks down upon them, it finds that they receive their comfort in this present world and in the passions that belong to the soul and body. As a result it cannot overshadow them any more, for love of money, human vainglory, and all the soul’s sicknesses and distractions, prevent that divine power from overshadowing them.

A "risk of indistinction" that must nevertheless be run, and a crucial "ecclesial or sacramental symbolization" that must nevertheless take only abstract forms

Jesuits of Canada

      "This profusion [(pluralization)] of relations"

—i.e. "The profusion [(pluralization)] of lifestyles and partnerships, the rise in life-expectancy [(l'allongement de l'existence)], the demand of some homosexuals for recognition, the presence of remarried divorcées in their difference [with]in the bosom of the Christian community, etc., . . . hospitality (cf. Heb 13:2) having become the principal mark of an eschatological credibility" (403)—,

"it should be recognized, entails clearly the risk of indistinction[.  For] ahead of every other reflection on relations [and every commitment to the sort of "relational" as distinguished from "ontological" "logic" (401) that I am arguing for, and that seems closer to "that symbolization of the distinction between the sexes via the [profusion of] states of life" that we encounter in "the letters to the Corinthians" (403)], Paul brought his authority violently into action against a case of incest in the bosom of the Corinthian community (1 Cor 5).  The ecclesial or sacramental symbolization of [(des)] differences [with]in [the context of (dans)] baptismal equality remains therefore decisive, even if it must find, in the framework of our cultural context, new forms of expression.  For however that may be [(quoi qu'il en soit)], the «eschatological concentration» of the time and the manifestation of the unicity of an existence envisaged as a whole implies an act of faith that consents to them [(y consent)] joyously and decisions of [an] irrevocable type that ratify the Christic bond, [a] bond that once [and] for all precedes our differences, as incommensurable as they may be.  Indissoluble marriage, but also other types of bonds or radical fidelities, founded on a [(la)] faith in the humanizing power of irrevocable decisions, are, though never capable of exempting us from the [(sans jamais pouvoir s'exempter des)] apprenticeships and new developments [(rebondissements)] of life, the «charismatic» expression of that eschatological bond that is Christ."

     Christoph Theobald, "Pour une anthropologie théologique de la difference," Recherches de science religieuse 102, no. 3 (2014):  404 (385-407), except where otherwise noted, translation, all underscoring, and every misunderstanding, mine.
     405:  "That inversion, scarcely probable in our societies, but possible, implies for theology that it allow itself to be dislodged from the tranquil possession of a «common law», in order to come face-to-face with human complexity, as perceived in the Book of the generations [that lies behind Gen 5:1-32 and 11:10-26], [all the while] accepting that one does not know from the get-go what is normal and what is abnormal, what is human and what is not. . . ."
    401:  "Let us recall that the more or less concrete description of «the alternative space» put in place by the first Christian communities makes the isolation of the distinction of the sexes, which is to say the idea of the couple as a pre-social, originating, or natural entity, impossible.  Instead we are faced with a «plurality of relational forms mediated by the distinction of the sexes» in the bosom of an ensemble of social markers that largely transcend that differentiation, the comprehensively important thing being to give an eschatological form or style to all of the meaningful relations, founded on the «ἐν Χριστῷ Ἰησοῦ».  An anthropology of the Maussian tradition that precisely refuses to start with an identitary classification of beings and substitutes for it an [(l')] entry via a relational logic [that] has no trouble describing that multi-form space and comparing it with others.  The question of personal identity under its current form, whether of «gender identity» or of «sexual identity», is not or not yet posed in [this multiform space]; [what is posed is] really only [(bien que)] the singularization by divine filiation in the bosom of the communitarian i.e. determinative bond."
     402:  "Without absolving St. Thomas [Aquinas] of his patriarchal conception of man/woman relations, one can adhere to the biblical desacralization of bisexuality that he inherited, i.e. the secularization of it that he promotes.  The necessary displacement [would] consist, however, in extricating the «male and female he created them» from its ontological status and in noting with biblical exegesis (and already K. Barth) that the «one flesh» of Gen 2:24 is not speaking of the conjugal union (and even less of the child), but, as the Song of Songs, of the bond between the man and the woman, [a] bond that, following the book of generations (Tolédôt), implicates other types of differences, those between generations, the story of which does not cease to follow complex twists and turns.  It emphasizes thus the opening up [(désenclavement)] of relations, the plurality of their forms [(figures)], and, above all, the mutation that they undergo over the course of life-spans."  Etc.

"the entire Church, from the Pope down, exists to make lives of that kind possible"

Divinity Library, Yale University

"'You are completely right.  If you had seen that saint in his lifetime you would not have looked at him twice.  He was exactly like one of the lay brothers who waited on us at dinner.  Yet the entire Church, from the Pope down, exists to make lives of that kind possible.'"

      A Maryknoll priest to Kenneth Scott Latourette just after the canonization of "a humble Bavarian lay monk" at the Vatican in the mid-1940s.  Beyond the ranges:  an autobiography (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 1967), 113.

"but I know Who is there"

Divinity Library, Yale University

"For weeks in that autumn of 1925 I realized that I was at least an agnostic and perhaps an atheist.  If that attitude persisted I would, in all honesty, have had to resign from the faculty of the Divinity School [at Yale] and the ministry.  I can still remember almost the precise spot in a street in Portland when, like an illumination, the beginning of the answer flashed on me.  'Here,' I said, or a voice seemed to say to me, 'is my father.  He has never let me down and has always been dependable.  Unless there is Some One in the universe who is at least as dependable and as intelligent as he, by whatever means he has been brought into being, the universe does not make sense.'"

     Kenneth Scott Latourette, Beyond the ranges:  an autobiography (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 1967), 72.  And from p. 155, the last, itself an expansion upon what he says about his ever-thereafter growing confidence in "the Evangelical faith in which [he] had been reared", a confidence clearly rooted in life-long practice, way back on pp. 73-74:

     The emeritus years passed quickly.  They were the richest and happiest of my life.  That was . . . chiefly because of growing friendship with God.  Wondering and grateful appreciation of the Good News grew. . . .  What lies beyond this present life I cannot know in detail, but I know Who is there and am convinced that through God's grace, that love which I do not and cannot deserve, eternal life has begun here and now, and eternal life is to know God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. 

Latourette on Linfield

Divinity Library, Yale University

"Yet I have often said that the best teaching [at McMinnville—later Linfield—College from 1901] was certainly as good, and perhaps better, than the best I later had at Yale, and the worst teaching was not as bad as the worst that I had at Yale."

     Kenneth Scott Latourette, Beyond the ranges:  an autobiography (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 1967), 19-20.