“Honesty is never solemn; it is only hypocrisy that can be that. Honesty always laughs, because things are so laughable.”
G.K. Chesterton “A Plea for Hasty Journalism” in The Apostle and the Wild Ducks, quoted in “Can’t You Take A Joke?” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
“It helps a lot, with two people as much together as he and I were, if they understand each other. He understood that I was too strong-minded to add another word unless he told me to, and I understood that he was too pigheaded to tell me to.”
Archie Goodwin’s internal monologue himself and Nero Wolfe in Rex Stout The Final Deduction
“By virtue of his status as the Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, the Nobel Committee invited Lewis to submit a nomination for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1961. Lewis had several possible candidates on his mind: E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and his old friend Tolkien. It probably did not take much reflection to settle on Tolkien. Lewis’s letters of the previous ten years are strewn with references to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings prior to and after its publication, and his commendation of it to anyone who could read. However Tolkien might have felt about Lewis after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and his marriage to Joy, Lewis continued to admire and miss his friend. The Nobel Committee did not agree with Lewis, preferring to present the prize in 1961 to Ivo Andrić of Yugoslavia.”
Harry Lee Poe The Completion of C.S. Lewis (and I defy anyone to name a work by “Ivo Andrić of Yugoslavia” or, indeed, any recent recepient of this supposedly prestigious award).
“In 100 years, we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college.”
Joe Sobran quoted “In the last issue of Gilbert” by David Deavel, according to Pamela Patnode “The Art of Language” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2023); she added “The observation rings true today, and it has scriptural significance.”
“Ideas and values, not location or weather, were what distinguished the Greeks.”
Victor Davis Hanson The Wars of the Ancient Greeks
“the type of modern idealism is a very narrow type. As Stevenson said, modern civilisation is ‘a dingy, ungentlemanly business. It leaves so much out of a man.’ In the old romances it was the villain that was monotonous. In the old melodramas it was the villain who always looked the same. His black moustache, eyeglass, and cigarette, were a sort of uniform of the infernal service. But the good men were of all conceivable shapes and colours – and some rather inconceivable. Don Quixote was a good man, and starved himself; Mr. Pickwick was a good man, and did not object to milk punch; Sam Weller was a good man, and did not object to pretty housemaids; the Master of Ravenswood was a good man and got drowned; Sidney Carton was a good man and got drunk; Benedick is a good man in Much Ado About Nothing; and so is the Friar in Romeo and Juliet. The old masters maintain the gayest miscellaneousness in good men by having one black stick to represent bad men. It was like the patches that their ladies put upon their complexions. That one black spot threw up and set free all the changing colours and contours of real health. But to-day we are drifting to the opposite extreme. We are getting only one kind of good man – one who approves of international peace, one who is quite in favour of social reform, one who thinks there should be a minimum wage, but also a court of arbitration – enough, you know him. And we have got around us, on the other hand, every antic and extravagance of the evil man; varieties which none of the old romancers could have conceived, or would have been permitted to describe. I confess I prefer the old-time notice-boards warning men off particular precipices and swamps in what is in other respects a rolling and romantic land of liberty.”
G.K. Chesterton in The Eye Witness March 7, 1912 reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2023)
Today on The Alex Pierson Show on Global News Radio 640 Toronto I called the decision a vindication of the free society, and Zuckerberg’s explanation remarkably clear and frank.
“Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.”
Oscar Wilde, in Lady Windemere’s Fan