“Come join the party”
Slogan that came to me regarding the need to be cheerful in policy polemics and struggles during a conversation June 25, 2025.
“Fools can be found to support anything…”
Theodore Dalrymple in National Review November 20, 2006 [specifically re people who call the niqab liberating for women].
“Leisure is not in any way identical with liberty. My dog has any amount of leisure. In fact, he has nothing else. But for all that he has no liberty.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News July 14, 1923, in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 #1 (September 2000)
“My favorite reprobate, Jerry Lee Lewis, was so wonderfully gifted that no one has ever been able to produce anything more than plastic mechanical imitations of his music. They reconstruct the bones, but there is no life. Ranked among the five most original and influential pianists of the last century, he had no piano lessons and could not read music. When asked, he would drawl, ‘It was God who gave me my talent. I don’t question God. He can cut my water off anytime.’ The water flowed for more than 70 years. On his 80th birthday he played before a packed house at the London Palladium. Anyone who doesn’t know that Jerry Lee Lewis is an original musical genius has never gotten acquainted with his work. He died at 87 professing his faith in ‘the unlimited grace of Almighty God.’ With a nod to Oscar Wilde, Our Lord calls great saints and great sinners. Respectable folk can be Episcopalians.”
Brent Forrest in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“Never get mad at anybody for knowing more than you do. It’s not their fault.”
“Elizabethtown (KENTUCKY) News” quoted in “Other Suspects I Quotes not by GKC” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #2 (Nov./Dec. 2024)
“[W]e are learning to do a great many clever things. Unless we are much mistaken the next great task will be to learn not to do them.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted in “News With Views” “compiled by Mark Pilon” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025) [the specific context is using CRISPR to bring back extinct animals].
“It was the glory of Roman law that it protected the individual against the state.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ [although he describes frankly the considerable degree of legal and constitutional chaos that existed, including Hadrian trying to draw it all into a Perpetual Edict only the Emperor could change]
“We are not very credulous about statistics. It was in some ways unfortunate when men found they could tell lies in Arabic numerals as well as in Roman letters.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly May 12, 1928, quoted in “Statistics” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)