“the Roman empire is afflicted rather than changed – a thing which has befallen it in other times also, before the name of Christ was heard, and it has been restored after such affliction – a thing which even in these times is not to be despaired of.”
Augustine City of God
In my latest National Post column I say Remembrance Day is not a pacifist occasion, even on the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War. (On which, and on the meaning and impact of World War I generally, see again The Great War Remembered on YouTube or in my online store.)
“Economic systems come and go like fashions in surgery and in the clothes of women, and during the nineteenth century the Mercantile System was discarded in favour of a system of free and open competition. At least, so I have been told.”
Hendrick Van Loon The Story of Mankind
“Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, ‘I will not hit you if you do not hit me’; there is no trace of such a transaction. There is a trace of both men having said, ‘We must not hit each other in the holy place.’”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
In a speech to the Augustine College Summer Seminar in June (sorry, I’m a bit behind in my video editing) I argue that the calamities of the 20th century derived, fundamentally, from a rejection of the notion of truth.
“It is the curse of our epoch that the educated are uneducated, especially in the study of history – which is only the study of humanity. Their ignorance is less logical than the ignorance of the Dark Ages, because those ages filled the place of history with legends, which at least professed to deal with the first things, while we only fill it with news, which can only deal with the latest.”
G. K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News March 22, 1919, quoted in Gilbert Magazine April-May 2009
“‘All the same,’ said the Scarecrow, ‘I shall ask for brains instead of a heart; for a fool would not know what to do with a heart if he had one.’ ‘I shall take the heart,’ returned the Tin Woodman; ‘for brains do not make one happy, and happiness is the best thing in the world.’”
L. Frank Baum The Wizard of Oz