“Now the modern critic is a humbug, because he professes to be entirely inarticulate. Speech is his whole business; and he boasts of being speechless. Before Botticelli he is mute. And the eulogists of the latest artistic insanities (Cubism and Post-Impressionism and Mr. Picasso) are eulogists and nothing else. They are not critics; least of all creative critics. They do not attempt to translate beauty into language; they merely tell you that it is untranslatable – that is, unutterable, indefinable, indescribable, impalpable, ineffable, and all the rest of it. The cloud is their banner; they cry to chaos and old night. They circulate a piece of paper on which Mr. Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried to dry it with his boots, and they seek to terrify democracy by the good old anti-democratic muddlements: that ‘the public’ does not understand these things; that ‘the likes of us’ cannot dare to question the dark decisions of our lords.”

G.K. Chesterton in “The Mystagogue” in A Miscellany of Men, quoted in “Art Criticism” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)

“Jerome K. Jerome, author of the enormously successful Three Men in a Boat, took the line that the sporting spirit was the essence of civilization and called on the Germans to treat the war as ‘The Greatest Game of All’: ‘Come, gentlemen, let us make an honorable contest of it, that shall leave as little bitterness behind it as may be. Let us see if we cannot make a fine game of it that we shall be all the better for having played out to the end. From which we shall all come back home cleaner minded, clearer seeing, made kinder to one another by suffering. Come, gentlemen, you believe that God has called upon you to spread German culture through the lands. You are ready to die for your faith. And we believe God has a use for the thing called England. Well, let us fight it out. There seems no other way. You for St. Michael and we for St. George; and God be with us both. But do not let us lose our common humanity in the struggle. That were the worst defeat of all: the only defeat that would really matter, that would really be really lasting. Let us call it a game. After all, what else is it?’”

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

“Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”

G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Charlie Reese “Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton, and more importantly, a two-time wearer of the Clerihew Championship Sash” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024) [he does not further source it].

“If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.”
Will Rogers quoted in “More Random Quotes” in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #1 (9/03)

“He [Octavian aka Augustus Caesar] kept to the end his bourgeois good sense, conservatism, parsimony, and caution. Festina lente – ‘make haste slowly’ – was his favorite saw.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“Ted Williams once said of the latter group [sportswriters, possibly Bostonian in particular] that you could pour hot water on them and get ‘instant s—t.’”

Colby Cosh in Western Standard May 21, 2007 [again bending my normal ban on cussing but my objection is not that you should never swear, it’s that you should do so rarely… for instance here; I’d been holding off using this one but surely you admit it’s funny and could not be said in any other way].

“Modern criticism has come to mean this: that nobody knows what an artist is trying to do, and therefore nobody knows whether he has done it.”

G.K. Chesterton in New York American 30/12/1933, quoted in “Art Criticism” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)

“Reading accounts of the CPR’s history today can make you laugh at how much more ambitious the builders of that age were. Small groups of surveyors trekked through mountainous passes, relied on Indigenous guides, worked far from any familiar settlements, and made decisions that, by modern standards, were acted on with astonishing speed. I write these words from Peterborough, Ont., which is supposed to be a stop on a future high-speed rail line linking Toronto to Quebec City. For decades, governments have talked about building this corridor. In different forms, Pierre Trudeau promised it, as did Jean Chrétien. Stephen Harper vacillated, and then Justin Trudeau assured us it would be built. The younger Trudeau even established Crown corporations to plan and study it. One of his last actions in February 2025 was to announce that the line was now definitely going to happen. How did he prove this? By announcing funding to study and plan the route — not to build it. As of now, the proposal, still without construction funding, is to begin building in 2029. That’s a lot of promises: zero building. Or consider Toronto’s now-infamous Eglinton Crosstown. First imagined as a subway expansion in the 1970s, construction even began before being cancelled. The plan was later resurrected as a light-rail line, interrupted during the Rob Ford era, and construction finally began in 2011. It was supposed to open in 2020. As of early January 2026, it still isn’t open. In other words, Toronto has taken longer to build and open a 19-kilometre light-rail line than Macdonald’s Canada took to build nearly 3,500 kilometres of transcontinental railway across rugged terrain and mountains. Build Canada indeed.”

Christopher Dummitt in National Post Jan. 11, 2026