“The unsigned articles appearing in this magazine sometimes represent the views of the editor – and frequently of no one else.”
“FRANK E. MASLAND, JR.” quoted in “Other Suspects – V” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“The statistician is trying to make a rigid and unchangeable chain out of elastic links.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News July 23, 1927, quoted in “Statistics” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“St Augustine, it would be generally agreed, has had a greater influence upon the history of dogma and upon religious thought and sentiment in Western Christendom than any other writer outside the canon of Scripture. It is easy to find at least one reason for this in the circumstances of the age during which his life was passed. From A.D. 350 till about A.D. 500 the vital powers of the ancient civilization were steadily declining, while at the same time the church was coming to social maturity with a number of insistent needs and demands which had not made themselves felt until full freedom of action had been attained. This period was followed by another, some 500 years in length, in which intellectual life at the higher levels was all but extinct in the West, and this epoch in its turn by one in which an adolescent Europe turned avidly for mental food to the masters nearest to hand and latest in time, the Latin writers of the imperial decline, who alone were available in the libraries of the age. These circumstances gave great importance and a new significance to a scattered group of teachers who had been the last to absorb the message of the ancient world while it was still to be heard, and who had therefore been the last to hand on the legacy of the past…”
David Knowles The Evolution of Medieval Thought [the metaphor of an “adolescent Europe” deserves attention but not respect].
“Now this modern refusal to undo what has been done is not only an intellectual fault; it is a moral fault also. It is not merely our mental inability to understand the mistake we have made. It is also our spiritual refusal to admit that we have made a mistake.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted in stand-alone box without further attribution in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“We have the regular symptom of the young thinker saying ‘There is no evil’; which invariably ends in his screaming aloud that the whole world is evil because it will not believe that there is no evil.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted, apparently from the BBC radio program “The Listener” in 1933, by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“No theories and no pedantic statistics will ever prevent ordinary people from finding a meaning and a literature in their own lives: great tragedy when the baby dies; great comedy when the baby tries to eat the soap. We always take ourselves seriously; it is only learned men, in huge books, who take us frivolously, and make us feel like a swarm of flies.”
G.K. Chesterton in London Opinion April 2 1904, quoted in “Statistics” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“The muddle is not merely due to the sin of anger; that is, to people losing their tempers with each other. It is also due to the sin of sloth; to people not taking the trouble to listen to each other, or take note of what each other really says. My first point, therefore, is that sloth, intellectual sloth, as well as mere emotional anger, is a great modern foe to charity.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted, apparently from the BBC radio program “The Listener” in 1933, by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“In Biblical days it was considered a miracle for an ass to speak; but today it would be a miracle if one kept quiet.”
“POSSIBLY FROM SOMEONE IN MISSOURI, OR ELSE ABOUT SOMEONE IN MISSOURI” quoted in “Other Suspects – V” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025) p. 23.