“Life’s short. Make sure you spend as much time as possible on the Internet arguing with strangers about politics.”
An image emailed by a friend without attribution June 9, 2025
“Those pairs could only have been made by one who saw before him the Soul of Boot…”
John Galsworthy regarding a particular bootmaker’s samples in William Bennett The Book of Virtues
“Students of popular science… are always insisting that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism”
G.K. Chesterton “Art and Religion” reprinted in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #2 (Nov./Dec. 2024)
“A man is drunk when he feels sophisticated and can’t pronounce it.”
Joe Sullivan quoted in “Other Suspects – II Quotes not by GKC” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #3 (Jan./Feb. 2025)
“Nazism was an attempt to lie beautifully to the German nation and to the world. The beautiful lie is, however, also the essence of kitsch. Kitsch is a form of make-believe, a form of deception. It is an alternative to the daily reality that would otherwise be a spiritual vacuum. It represents ‘fun’ and ‘excitement,’ energy and spectacle and above all ‘beauty.’ Kitsch replaces ethics with aesthetics. Kitsch is the mask of Death. Nazism was the ultimate expression of kitsch, of its mind-numbing, death-dealing portent. Naziism, like kitsch, masqueraded as life; the reality of both was death. The Third Reich was the creation of ‘kitsch men,’ people who confused the relationship between life and art, reality and myth, and who regarded the goal of existence as mere affirmation, devoid of criticism, difficulty, insight. Their sensibility was rooted in superficiality, falsity, plagiarism, and forgery. Their art was rooted in ugliness. They took the ideals, though not the form, of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century avant-garde, and of the German nation in the Great War, and by means of technology – the mirror – they suited these ideals to their own purpose. Germany, the home of Dichter und Denker [Poets and thinkers], of many of the greatest cultural achievements of modern man, became in the Third Reich the home of Richter und Henker [Judges and hangmen]: the incarnation of kitsch and nihilism.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“We have seen the end of the age of Reason; and that we live in the age of Suggestion. Perhaps for the first time, the degradation of Man has been openly declared; in a theory that he can be persuaded without being convinced.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly Nov. 1, 1934, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #2 (Nov./Dec. 2024)
“When Chesterton had been on the London literary scene for only a few years, both the general public and the literary critics started realizing his great versatility… ‘It has been suspected for some time,’ wrote an anonymous critic, ‘that his foible is omniscience.’ (Manchester Courier, Mar. 18, 1905).”
Dale Ahlquist “Tremendous Trifles” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #3 (Jan./Feb. 2025)
“Work while you work,/ Play while you play;/ One thing each time,/ That is the way. All that you do,/ Do with your might;/ Things done by halves/ Are not done right.”
Complete text of “Work while you work” from McGuffey’s Primer, in William Bennett The Book of Virtues