“The creation of a new creature, not ourselves, of a new conscious center, of a new and independent focus of experience and enjoyment, is an immeasurably more grand and godlike act even than a real love affair; how much more superior to a momentary physical satisfaction. If creating another self is not noble, why is pure self-indulgence nobler?”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly Sept. 27, 1930, quoted in “Why Do You Keep Asking Me Rhetorical Questions?” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)

“If you spell ‘absolutely nothing’ backwards, you get gnihton yletulosba which means absolutely nothing.”

Emailed by a friend without attribution; it seems to be widely available online.

In my latest Epoch Times column I unearth and reprint a set of principles I outlined when the 21st century was young and fresh to guide is through an uncertain future, and claim that I have been largely vindicated. I also challenge my fellow pundits to do likewise (and scoff at politicians’ forecasts) because I say you should listen to the person who gets it right not the one who offers soothing but inaccurate platitudes.

“he is a self-styled public-relations counselor – one of the various modern activities that are an insult to the dignity of man.”

Nero Wolfe to Inspector Cramer about Floyd Vance in Rex Stout The Father Hunt

“No one could possibly imagine that the Last Supper would be singled out for such grotesque disparagement as it was in Paris last week by people who actually believed that the central figure in the Last Supper really was whipped almost to death and nailed upon a cross until he died. No one, no matter how depraved or degraded, could possibly find such a horrible event remotely amusing. The agreeable aspect of it, the ‘fun’ that our media detected in it, was the pitifully adolescent thrill of a send-up of a starkly mortifying event that more than a billion people unselfconsciously consider to have been one of the most notable encounters there has ever been between man and his Creator. The thrill and the fun are to be found in rendering repulsive and perverted an occasion that a vast number of worthy and in very many cases, exceptionally accomplished and intellectually sophisticated people regard as a sacred moment when the divinely inspired missionary of the deity was among us and about to make an overwhelming sacrifice for the moral betterment of mankind. It is intellectual vandalism, iconoclastic churlishness, like the young mountebank Mussolini looking heavenwards like King Lear and bellowing to an appreciative crowd ‘I say you don’t exist; if you do strike me down, God.’ (Possibly the Duce remembered this as he and his mistress were executed by communist guerrillas prior to being hung upside down by their ankles and their corpses desecrated in a gas station in Milan in April 1945.)”

Conrad Black in National Post August 3, 2024

“There has been, as every informed Canadians knows, an avalanche of ludicrous judicial decisions, and the Supreme Court of Canada, because of inappropriate appointments to it from successive prime ministers, has become an almost constant source of absurd judgments. In one case a few years ago, the high court determined that the Charter’s right of assembly guaranteed the right of employees of the government of Saskatchewan performing essential work to strike. The upper courts have allowed judges to make an incoherent smorgasbord of our laws, with a shrinking number of reliable precedents and highly idiosyncratic lower court interpretations that pay no attention to the normal meaning of the language or intention of the legislators. This means that when the courts have finished, the legislators haven’t been legislating at all-just putting forth thoughts for the delectation of the bench. But even more sinister, the courts as a whole have followed the legislators into complete abdication in allowing the administrative state to function as it wishes without any apparent reference whatever to the text of law. In the case of Jordan Peterson, his freedom of expression counts for nothing in the face of churlish and self-righteous students or even a few frequenters of the Internet.”

Conrad Black in National Post August 17, 2024

“There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night —/ Ten to make and the match to win —/ A bumping pitch and a blinding light,/ An hour to play and the last man in./ And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,/ Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,/ But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote/ ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’/ The sand of the desert is sodden red, —/ Red with the wreck of a square that broke; —/ The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,/ And the regiment blind with dust and smoke./ The river of death has brimmed his banks,/ And England’s far, and Honour a name,/ But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks,/ ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’”

Sir Henry Newbolt “Vitaï Lampada”, 1898, quoted and described as “Probably the most famous poem of the late Victorian and Edwardian era” by Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“Don’t criticize, critique.”

Slogan suggested to me by some one whose name I didn’t record, around April 1999.