“There is no more remarkable psychological element in history than the way in which a period can suddenly become unintelligible... To the early Victorian period we have in a moment lost the key: the Crystal Palace is the temple of a forgotten creed. The thing always happens sharply...”
G.K. Chesterton’s 1904 biography of G.F. Watts, quoted in Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton
In my latest Epoch Times column I say various judicial, academic and activist claims that the Canadian state does not exercise legitimate sovereignty over Canadian territory, including granting valid “fee simple” land titles, are a recipe for confusion, bitterness and disaster.
“Democracy as a failure is better than Dictatorship as a success.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted without further attribution by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)
“The scenes uncovered by the allied armies in 1945 were not the inevitable outgrowth of the events that took place in early 1933, but they were a probable outcome. National Socialism was yet another offspring of the hybrid that has been the modernist impulse: irrationalism crossed with technicism. Nazism was not just a political movement; it was a cultural eruption. It was not imposed by a few; it developed among many. National Socialism was the apotheosis of a secular idealism that, propelled by a dire sense of existential crisis, lost all trace of humility and modesty – indeed, of reality. Borders and limits became meaningless. In the end this idealism completed a circle, turned upon itself, and became anthropophagous. What began as idealism ended as nihilism. What began as celebration ended as scourge. What began as life ended as death. Contrary to many interpretations of Nazism, which tend to view it as a reactionary movement, as, in the words of Thomas Mann, an ‘explosion of antiquarianism,’ intent on turning Germany into a pastoral folk community of thatched cottages and happy peasants, the general thrust of the movement, despite archaisms, was futuristic. Nazism was a headlong plunge into the future, toward a ‘brave new world.’ Of course it used to full advantage residual conservative and utopian longings, paid its respects to those these romantic visions, and picked its ideological trappings from the German past, but its goals were, by its own lights, distinctly progressive.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“We have to realize that the child’s world is without economic purpose. A child doesn’t understand – happy ignorance – that people are paid to do things. To a child the policeman rules the street for self-important majesty; the furnace man stokes the furnace because he loves the noise of falling coal and the fun of getting dirty; the grocer is held to his counter by the lure of aromatic spices and the joy of giving. And in this very ignorance there is a grain of truth. The child’s economic world may be the one that we are reaching out in vain to find. Here is a path in the wood of economics that some day might be followed to new discovery. Meantime, the children know it well and gather beside it their flowers of beautiful illusion.”
“War-Time Santa Claus” in Stephen Leacock On the Front Line of Life
“The Church does not say that all heretics are lost, for it does say that there is a common conscience by which they may be saved. But it does definitely say that he who knows the whole truth sins in accepting half the truth.”
G.K. Chesterton in “Roman Catholicism” in An Outline of Christianity, quoted in “Another Look at the Catholic Idea” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)
“Starving Bull had succeeded in killing a skunk during his journey. This performance, while highly creditable to his energy as a hunter, was by no means conducive to his success, as a cook. Bitterly did that skunk revenge himself upon us who had borne no part in his destruction. Pemmican is at no time a delicacy; But pemmican flavored with skunk was more than I could attempt. However, Starving Bull proved himself worthy of his name, and the frying-pan was soon scraped clean under his hungry manipulations.”
W.F. Butler The Great Lone Land
In my latest Loonie Politics column I deplore the modern habit of judging budgets by how much boodle we personally pocketed rather than how well or poorly it safeguarded the national finances, as if our own narrow self-interest were self-evidently the national interest.