“The Boomers came of age in the initial, seemingly carefree days of the Sexual Revolution. That revolution’s holy grail, the pill, roared onto the scene in the 1960s. For the first time in history, it appeared, the male inclination to sexual adventuring would now no longer involve tradeoffs or consequences, since sex could be separated from childbearing. Chesterton famously observed that ‘The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.’ The Boomers believed at the time that they were entitled to ignore fact number two. In pursuit of this mirage of ‘freedom,’ they also discarded family ties and responsibilities. Patriotism evaporated and they abandoned God and the church in droves. The sweet Woodstock-infused air of a new Garden of Eden seemed just around the corner. But the Boomers, it turned out, had not heard the siren song embedded in the soothing melodies of the Sexual Revolution, which lured young men and women to emptiness and pain. In that dreamtime, many didn’t appreciate the price to be paid for that illusory ‘freedom’ – the objectification of women and the impaired ability of men to love in the sacrificial ways necessary to promote a rich, rewarding family life.”

Mark Johnson recoiling from Mick Jagger still touring at 80 and doing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024) [having seen the Stones with his wife in 1989 and her recoiling then].

“Outside Stalingrad, Hitler imposed a complete news blackout on events. Reports of the Russian offensive were published in Germany, but the news articles and newsreels stated that the offensive had been halted. This was true, but no mention was made of the fact that the offensive had not been halted until the 6th army had been surrounded. Propaganda Chief Joseph Goebbels was unhappy with this decision. He had built his enormously successful career on a platform of blending truth and lies with emotions and prejudice, but his key policy had always been to make whatever he said believable, even if it was actually untrue. Goebbels was not convinced that Stalingrad could be saved and was therefore disturbed by the fact that its plight was not to be talked about. He withdrew to think about how he and the Nazi propaganda machine would handle events.”

Rupert Matthews Stalingrad: The Battle that Shattered Hitler’s Dream of World Domination

“What more can we have on our side than the common sense of everybody?”

G.K. Chesterton in Daily News 20/6/1903, quoted in “Why Do You Ask Me Rhetorical Questions? – 5” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2023)

“An old cowhand in Colorado, learning that Jean Stafford was a writer, observed, ‘That’s real nice work, Jean. It’s something you can do in the shade.’”

Clifton Fadiman The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes

“Fr. Paul D. Scalia: ‘Whoever receives one child such as this in my name, receives me.’ Perhaps we can hear in these words an invitation to couples to have more children. The young G.K. Chesterton once wrote a bit of doggerel that captures his love of the Christ-child and of childhood in general: ‘I would say to all parents/ Do you take things equally/ How do you know that you are not/ In the place of Joseph and Mary.’ Of course, those two things are profoundly related. Childhood wasn’t valued until God became a child. The ancient world didn’t have the same affection or sentimentality for children that we have. In both Aramaic and Greek, the word for child was the same as for servant. It’s not that the world thought children were delightful, and so God became a child. It’s rather that by becoming a child, God sanctified childhood and children.”

Start of email from The Catholic Thing Sept. 22, 2024

“She’s always late. Her ancestors arrived on the June Flower.”

Top 20 Internet Tag Lines in Gilbert! Vol. 4 #8 (July/August 2001)

“Our educational authorities have already made sure that the system is rigid without making sure that it is right. They have already achieved universality but not unity. They have arranged to teach history without considering what history teaches; they have obtained powers of compulsion for teaching the truth to everybody; and then, looking into their own minds, have found that the truth is not in them.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 12, 1920 as a header quotation on Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

“Words matter. They are the vessels that carry moral meaning across generations. When they are stretched beyond recognition, they do not become more powerful; they become useless. That is why the recent spectacle surrounding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – now casually accused of committing ‘genocide’ – demands serious attention. Not because the charge is credible, but because it reveals how far public discourse has descended into moral inflation and historical amnesia. The most disturbing element of this phenomenon is not found on fringe social-media platforms, but in mainstream conversation—amplified by prominent voices and repeated without shame. When enforcement of immigration law in a constitutional democracy is labeled ‘genocide,’ the word itself ceases to mean what it once did. And that loss is not academic. It is catastrophic. The term genocide was coined to describe the deliberate, systematic annihilation of an entire people. It was meant to capture the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust and other acts of mass extermination. It refers to death camps, mass graves, starvation, forced sterilization, and the total erasure of a people’s existence. It does not refer to border enforcement, deportation proceedings, or the execution of court-ordered removal. Yet today, this distinction is treated as pedantic – almost offensive. Emotion has replaced definition. Outrage has replaced precision…. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz did not merely echo the claim that ICE enforcement constitutes ‘genocide.’ He compared the fear of young people whose families are in the country illegally to Anne Frank, the Jewish teenager hunted by the Nazi state and ultimately murdered in Bergen-Belsen. This is not historical illiteracy; it is moral obscenity. Anne Frank was hiding from a government committed to the total extermination of her people. ICE is enforcing immigration law in a constitutional democracy – often against individuals who have already received due process and removal orders. To equate lawful immigration enforcement with the machinery of Auschwitz is to empty the Holocaust of its meaning and to weaponize Jewish suffering for contemporary political theater. It is precisely this collapse of moral scale—where everything disliked becomes ‘genocide’ and every fear becomes Anne Frank—that makes serious conversation impossible and turns historical memory into a blunt instrument rather than a solemn responsibility. This is not merely offensive to Jews. It is dangerous to society at large. When the Holocaust becomes a metaphor rather than a historical event, it loses its power to warn. If Anne Frank is everyone, then she is no one.”

The Times of Israel blog by Benjamin Blech [the Times explicitly takes no authorship or responsibility for its blogs] Feb. 5, 2026 [https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/when-ice-became-the-gestapo/].