“If you particularly want it [a post] to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
“’There is no graded scale of essential worth,’ [Martin Luther King Jr.] King had written a year before his assassination. ‘Every human being has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the creator. Every man must be respected because God loves him.’ Every woman too, a feminist might have added. Yet King’s words, while certainly bearing witness to an instinctive strain of patriarchy within Christianity, bore witness as well to why, across the Western world, this was coming to seem a problem. That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely self-evident truth. A Roman would have laughed at it. To campaign against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality, however, was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a common assumption: that everyone possessed an inherent worth. The origins of this principle – as Nietzsche had so contemptuously pointed out – lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“There are diverse attitudes to babies in public spaces, and many efforts to formulate the rules for manners and etiquette without annoying anyone too much.... Many of the troublesome examples arise from people who are annoyed by babies, but should really just mind their own business and deal with it. But other examples reveal a crude overconfidence in parents about the behaviour of their child, an inflated sense of how cute their baby seems to other adults. At worst, this is an entitled sanctimony that verges on rude cluelessness…. So what that squinty-eyed view of babies in public boils down to is this. It’s not that you shouldn’t bring your baby to this public event because it’s wrong in principle to bring babies to public events. It’s a more subtle point. You shouldn’t bring your baby to this public event because you are being annoying, right here and now, just you, specifically you. And let’s be clear. No one can blame the baby. The parent is the annoyance. This is not the time to share your views on child development theory, knowing that social media will back you up. These are beside the point. Junior’s being a pest, which at least for the time being means you’re being a pest.”
Joseph Brean in National Post Sept. 9, 2025 [summarizing the squinty-eyed views of etiquette expert Elaine Swann]
“Where there are no men, be thou a man.”
“Rabbi Hillel” quoted as 1st of 3 header quotations in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [before even the table of contents].
“Birth Control is an oily optimistic euphemism for something totally different; as if we were to call assassination or massacre Life-Control.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted by Dale Ahlquist in “Chesterton University” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #2 (Nov./Dec. 2024)
“Man arrested, accused of trespassing naked in Disneyland”
Headline in San Bernardino Sun April 14, 2025 [which offers the comfort that someone’s always having a worse day than you are but also the caution that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse.]
“The BBC reports that the North Hertfordshire Museum will now refer to Roman emperor Elagabalus with the female pronounces of she and her.”
Mark Pilon in “News with Views” “Compiled by Mark Pilon” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025)
“Il y a des folies qui se prennent comme les maladies contagieuses.”
La Rochefoucauld Maximes [Réflexions morales #300]