Nietzsche was “[c]ondemned by many as the most dangerous thinker who had ever lived, others hailed him as a prophet. There were many who considered him both. Nietzsche was not the first to have become a byword for atheism, of course. No one, though – not Spinoza, not Darwin, not Marx – had ever before dared to gaze quite so unblinkingly at what the murder of its god might mean for a civilization. ‘When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.’ Nietzsche’s loathing for those who imagined otherwise was intense. Philosophers he scorned as secret priests. Socialists, communists, democrats: all were equally deluded. ‘Naiveté: as if morality could survive when the God who sanctions it is missing!’”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“In a world where everything is so inter related that one feels helpless to know where or how grab hold and act, defeat sets in; for years there have been people who found society too overwhelming and have withdrawn, concentrated on ‘doing their own thing.’ Generally we have put them into mental hospitals and diagnosed them as schizophrenics. If the real radical finds that having long hair sets up psychological barriers to communication and organization, he cuts his hair.... As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be – it is necessary to begin where the world is if we're going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system. There's another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevsky said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people.”

“Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals

“The more you put in a brain, the more it will hold – if you have one.”

Nero Wolfe in Rex Stout Might As Well Be Dead

“A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.”

“Cervantes” quoted in “Other Suspects – III Quotes not by GKC” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025)

“Dorgelès called the [World War I] trenches ‘this huge confessional’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“Perhaps, the new intellectual world was really inaugurated when Oscar Wilde said about Bernard Shaw: ‘He has no enemies; but he is intensely disliked by all his friends.’”

G.K. Chesterton in “Peculiar Peace-Makers” in The New York American March 25, 1933, reprinted in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #2 (Nov./Dec. 2024)

On the 9th Hour podcast I joined theatre artist Breanna Doyle and host Charley to discuss heroes and villains in history, finding truth among shifting interpretations, and what it means for us today.

“As the myth of inevitable victory fragmented, the fragments became new, even larger, even brighter, myths. In a prolific spasm, illusion gave birth to a host of illusions. Horror was turned into spiritual fulfillment. War became peace. Death, life. Annihilation, freedom. Machine, poetry. Amorality, truth. Over eighteen thousand church bells and innumerable organ pipes were donated to the war effort, to be melted down and used for arms and ammunition. As the assault on the physical and social fixities of the nineteenth-century bourgeois world was intensified the resulting sensation was one of growing liberation from constraint, frontiers, forms. The promotion of this liberation continue to be the most important component of Pflicht. This association of death with life was a re-enactment, writ large, of the sacrificial sequence of Le Sacre du Printemps.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era