“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)
“he was the very personification of the cad who haunts the racecourse and who lives not so much by his own wits as by the lack of them in others.”
Baroness Orczy “The York Mystery” in Alan K. Russell, ed., Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
“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.]
“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)
“Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest thou also are like unto him.” “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own conceit.”
Proverbs XXVI:4 and 5 [King James Version]