Angela “Merkel, when she insisted that Islam belong in Germany just as much as Christianity, was only appearing to be even-handed. To hail a religion for its compatibility with a secular society was decidedly not a neutral gesture. Secularism was no less bred of the sweep of Christian history then were Orbán’s barbed-wire fences. Naturally, for it to function as its exponents wished it to function, this could never be admitted. The West, over the duration of its global hegemony, had become skilled in the art of repackaging Christian concepts for non-Christian audiences. A doctrine such as that of human rights was far likelier to be signed up to if its origins among the canon lawyers of medieval Europe could be kept concealed. The insistence of United Nations agencies on ‘the antiquity and broad acceptance of the conception of the rights of man’ was the necessary precondition for their claim to a global, rather than merely Western, jurisdiction. Secularism, in an identical manner, depended on the care with which it covered its tracks. If it were to be embraced by Jews, or Muslims, or Hindus as a neutral holder of the ring between them and people of other faiths, then it could not afford to be seen as what it was: a concept that had little meaning outside of a Christian context. In Europe, the secular had for so long been secularized that it was easy to forget its ultimate origins. To sign up to its premises was unavoidably to become just that bit more Christian. Merkel, welcoming Muslims to Germany, was inviting them to take their place in a continent that was not remotely neutral in its understanding of religion: a continent in which the division of church and state was absolutely assumed to apply to Islam.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“Any car will last your lifetime if you are careless enough.”

“American Eagle” quoted in “Other Suspects I Quotes not by GKC” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #2 (Nov./Dec. 2024)

Today on behalf of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms I delivered a petition to the Prime Minister’s office urging him not to proceed with this aggressive infringement on our digital privacy. Watch the video here: https://vimeo.com/1194808661

“Fred Durkin, big and burly and bald, knows exactly what he can expect of his brains and what he can't, which is more than you can say for a lot of people with a bigger supply.”

Archie Goodwin’s internal monologue in Rex Stout Might As Well Be Dead

“The young, talented, and already greatly respected historian Friedrich Meinecke wrote in the early months of the [First World] war that what the foreigner calls brutality in German behavior, the German himself must call simply honesty. After all, if the cathedral at Rheims was being used by French observers, it had to be bombed. It was as simple as that. For the French and British to call the German a barbarian in these circumstances was pure hypocrisy. Meinecke was relatively moderate. Another German historian expressed similar ideas in shriller tones: ‘Better than a thousand church towers fall than that one German soldier should fall as a result of these towers. Let’s not have any whining from humanists and aesthetes among ourselves. We have to assert ourselves. Those are such simple truths that it becomes tedious to have to repeat them to people who don't wish to hear.’ Rather than such unequivocal assertions about the pre-eminence of life force over history, one might have expected from Meinecke and his confrère, given their professions, a greater respect for the dependence of the individual and the nation on their historical context. Yet the emphasis in their comments is on the Dionysian act of self-assertion. In the course of the war, thirty-five of forty-three holders of chairs in history in German universities were to aver that Germany had become involved in the war only because she had been attacked.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“Our youth are impatient with the preliminaries that are essential to purposeful action. Effective organization is thwarted by the desire for instant and dramatic change, or as I have phrased it elsewhere the demand for revelation rather than revolution. It's the kind of thing we see in playwriting; The first act introduces the characters and the plot, in the second act the plot and characters are developed as the place drives to hold the audience’s attention. In the final act good and evil have their dramatic confrontation and resolution. The present generation wants to go right into the third act, skipping the first two, in which case there is no play, nothing but confrontation for confrontation’s sake – a flare up and back to darkness. To build a powerful organization takes time. It is tedious, but that's the way the game is played – if you want to play and not just yell, ‘Kill the umpire.’ What is the alternative to working ‘inside’ the system? A mess of rhetorical garbage about ‘Burn the system down!’ Yippie yells of ‘Do it!’ or ‘Do your thing.’ What else? Bombs? Sniping? Silence when police are killed and screams of ‘murdering fascist pigs’ when others are killed? Attacking and baiting the police? Public suicide?”

“Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals

“I have seen wicked men and fools, a great many of both; and I believe they both get paid in the end; but the fools first.”

Narrator’s internal monologue in Robert Louis Stevenson Kidnapped [by paid he means, obviously, they get their just comeuppance]

[This family profiled in a bleating story] “are fond of placing interesting quotes on the wall, and there is one they could really use that my teenage daughter’s competitive ringette team follows: ‘Don’t wish it was easier, make yourself better.’”

Letter from David McGruer in Ottawa Citizen Feb. 4, 2007 [the family in question had all sorts of sob stories about how the difficulties in making ends meet but in the letter writer’s opinion were not making some obvious efforts that would help]