“When someone realizes that he has said or done something silly, he always thinks it will be the last time. Far from concluding that he will do many more silly things, he concludes that this one will prevent him from doing so.”
Blaise Pascal Pensées
“Secret of living? Find people to pay you money to do what you would pay to do if you had the money.”
Sarah Caldwell quoted in D.P. Diffiné, “The 1993 American Incentive System Almanac”
“Gilbert’s history of man’s story [G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man] has the life of Jesus as the focal point of the world, the ‘crisis of history.’ The development of the Roman Catholic Church is the guiding line throughout history, a guide by which we can judge progress and advancement. Science has no place here, other than as a by-product of the spiritual centre, and man is no more near perfection in 1920 then he was in 1290. There has always been a path to heaven, and a road to somewhere else.”
Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton
“I got off to a roaring stop”
Me on sitting down to work December 29, 2924 with an ambitious agenda of cleaning up fundamentals and being immediately overwhelmed by urgent trivia in yesterday’s leftover email.
“In the end, he [G.K. Chesterton] says, the exaggeration of sex becomes sexlessness. We are no longer drawn to the bait on the hook. We are drawn to the hook itself.”
Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)
In countries they invaded in World War I “the Germans generally insisted on the right to requisition and to demand docility from a population under occupation. They were not alone in this, but they were virtually alone in positing an extreme version of the argument – the idea of Kriegsverrat. According to this view, the disruption of the war effort by civilians in occupied territory is as treasonous as disruption by one’s own nationals. The German occupation of Belgium was consistent with this proposition, and while as a whole certainly not as monstrous as Allied propaganda made it out to be, the occupation policy was nevertheless draconic. If babies were not systematically snatched from mothers’ arms and smashed against brick walls, if nuns were not deliberately sought out for sodomy, rape, and slaughter, if old people were not made to crawl on all fours before being riddled with bullets, considerable numbers of hostages were shot, including women and children and octogenarians. Louvaine was razed, together with its library, founded in 1426, with its 280,000 volumes at its priceless collection of in incunabula and medieval manuscripts. Schrechlichkeit, or frightfulness, was pronounced official policy in the occupied areas, initially in Belgium and then in France in Russia. The term furor teutonicus was used by Germans with pride.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“One of the great blows to stability has been the change in family life, from the first appearance of the teenager in the late 1930s, to Edmund Leach’s disturbing Reith lectures of 1967, which blamed the traditional family for most of society’s problems. There’s been a transformation in the way in which people arrange and furnish their houses, the sort of food they eat and where and how they eat it.”
Peter Hitchens The Abolition of Britain
“Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly”
Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria quoted in Will Durant Caesar and Christ