“Why should this [the inherent implausibility of the message, and the regular severe physical abuse he suffered for preaching it] have persuaded anyone in Galatia to accept the truth of Paul’s message? To abandon the cult of the Caesars was not merely to court danger, but to risk the very stitching that held together the patchwork society of the province’s cities. Yet some, for all this, did find the new identity proclaimed by Paul not a menace, but a liberation. The love felt by the Jewish God for his chosen people – so unlike anything displayed by the heedless gods of Galatia – had long aroused in Gentiles emotions of envy as well as suspicion. Now, by touring cities across the entire span of the Roman world, Paul set himself to bringing them the news of a convulsive upheaval in the affairs of heaven and earth. Once, like a child under the protection of a tutor, the Jews had been graced with the guardianship of a divinely authored law; but now, with the coming of Christ, the need for such guardianship was passed. No longer were the Jews alone ‘the children of God’. The exclusive character of their covenant was abrogated. The venerable distinctions between them and everyone else – of which male circumcision had always been the pre-eminent symbol – were transcended. Jews and Greeks, Galatians and Scythians: all alike, so long as they opened themselves to belief in Jesus Christ, were henceforward God’s holy people. This, so Paul informed his hosts, was the epochal message that Christ had charged him to proclaim to the limits of the world. ‘The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.’”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“As recently deceased Democratic congressman Morris Udall once wryly observed: ‘Everything that can be said has been said, but not everyone has said it yet.’”

Ottawa Citizen Dec. 21, 1998 [I did not record the name of the writer and I have heard other versions including that “not everyone who could have said it has said it yet.’”

“They will tell you the modern world rebels against Religion. It rebels much more against Reason.”

G.K. Chesterton in Listener Feb. 20, 1935 quoted in “Reason and its Discontents” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)

“Starting in Galilee in the 1730s, a Bedouin sheikh, Zahir al-Umar al-Zaydani, carved out a norther fiefdom, which he ruled from Acre, its Crusader ruins rebuilt as his palace, the effective capital for the next century. It was the only time, except short-lived rebellions, when a native Palestinian Arab ruled an extended part of the Holy Land.”

Simon Sebag Montefiore Jerusalem: The Biography A History of the Middle East

“Note the number of positive assertions made in the name of popular science, without the least pretence of scientific proof.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News July 12, 1930, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023) [and foretelling COVID, climate alarmism etc. with uncanny accuracy]

“The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.”

Elbert Hubbard according to www.quotationspage.com as of Dec. 10, 2005.

“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

Thomas Edison, e-mailed by a friend and confirmed by BrainyQuote [https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/thomas_a_edison_104931] [other variants are floating around, not all attributed to Edison]

“On one thing, at least, the emperor and the apostle [Paul] were agreed: in a world newly touched by the divine, nothing could be quite as it had been before. Nero, as the son of a god and the ruler of the world, was not bound by the drab and wearisome conventions that govern the affairs of mortals. Instead, like some figure sprung from tragedy, he killed his mother; he kicked his pregnant wife to death; he was married, dressed as a woman, to a man. Such it was to live as a hero of myth. What, in a city ruled by a superhuman figure, were mere proprieties? Rome itself was rendered complicit in their repeated and spectacular subversion. In the summer of AD 64, a great street party was thrown to celebrate the new order of things. And the very heart of the city, the lake was filled with sea-monsters. Along its edge, brothels were staffed with whores ranging from the cheapest streetwalkers to the most blue-blooded of aristocrats. For a single night, to the delight of the men who visited them and knew that the women were forbidden to refuse anyone, there was no slave or free. ‘Now a minion would take his mistress in the presence of his master; now a gladiator would take a girl of noble family before the gaze of her father.’ Yet out in the vast sprawl of the capital, in the apartment blocks and workshops of the largest city in the world, there were scattered communities of people who, and their rejection of conventions and norms, put even Nero in the shade. Paul was not the founder of the churches in Rome. Believers in Christ had appeared well before his own arrival there. Nevertheless, the letter that he had sent these Hagioi from Corinth, a lengthy statement of his beliefs that was designed as well to serve as an introduction to ‘all in Rome who are loved by God’, was like nothing they had ever heard before. The most detailed of Paul’s career, it promised to its recipients a dignity more revolutionary than even any of Nero’s stunts.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World