“The poet Rainer Maria Rilke and many others bowed in humble and awed obeisance to the ‘War God.’ Und wir? Glühen in Eines zusammen,/ In ein neues Geschöpf, das er tödlich belebt.* [“*And we? We glow as One/ A new creature invigorated by death.”] Invigoration by death: such was Germany's ‘rite of spring.’”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“The first impulse of an enlightened person on hearing the proposal to broadcast the debates of Parliament is merely that it is one of the typical triumphs of modern science. It is telling us that everybody can listen to what nobody wants to hear.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 5, 1925, quoted in “Radio (and TV and Movies)” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #3 (Jan./Feb. 2025)
“Every time a man puts a new idea across, he finds 10 men who thought of it before he did – but they only thought of it.”
“Anonymous” quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail March 8 2001.
“Father once mused that his ecumenical motto would be ‘Come home to the Catholic Church! It’s terrible here.’”
Dale Ahlquist reviewing Father Joseph Fessio, S.J.: California Blackrobe by Cornelius Michael Buckley, S.J., in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #3 (Jan./Feb. 2025)
“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.]
“Philosophy has been defined as the study of ultimate reality and of the general causes and principles of things, with a particular reference to the human being, and to the principles and ends of human conduct.”
David Knowles The Evolution of Medieval Thought [1st sentence of book not counting Preface]
“The inclination here was to regard the war as a form of art, as a superior representation of life: only when mankind recognized that salvation lay in aesthetic values, in the symbolism of life and death, and not in sterile social norms, would the horror and sadness have meaning and be overcome. As evocation, as an instrument of change, the war had a positive purpose – that was the judgment of many artists, at least early on. The most radical artistic response to the war came from a group of people who made a complete break with traditional loyalties and gathered in neutral Zürich in 1915 to found there the Dada idea – if one can speak of this nihilistic manifestation as an idea. The cohort had an international flavor but its core was German.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“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)