“Whatever men have rightly said, no matter who or where, is the property of us Christians.”
Origen, who applied long-established scholarly methods of understanding ancient texts to Biblical ones, quoted in Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“I don’t know if you have ever turned over a dead animal, but depending on how ripe the carcass is, there is a whiff that rises so strongly that the air itself changes color, and a kind of greasy film of rot coats your insides.”
David Beresford, in a piece on a hideous expensive cheese someone once gave him, in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 #8 (Issue 57, 7-8/04)
“You may not be able to change the world, but you can at least embarrass the guilty.”
Jessica Mitford, whose best-selling 1963 exposé of the US funeral industry “The American Way of Death” did change the world, and got her named “Queen of the Muckrakers” by Time in 1970, quoted by Robert Bryce on Substack Jan. 29, 2026 [https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/yacht-zee].
“I could hardly avoid a sort of suspicion that some of those [Professors] whom I was taken to see had been so long engrossed in their own study of hypothetics that they had become the exact antithesis of the Athenians in the days of St. Paul; for whereas the Athenians spent their lives in nothing save to see and to hear some new thing, there were some here who seemed to devote themselves to the avoidance of every opinion with which they were not perfectly familiar, and regarded their own brains as a sort of sanctuary, to which if an opinion had once resorted, none other was to attack it.”
Samuel Butler Erewhon
“Felipe Alou, the team’s manager and club-house philosopher (and Moises’ father), maintains that no team ever won anything with their mouths.”
Maclean’s April 5, 1993
“A decolonized university is no university at all.”
Michelle Stirling “Dr. Frances Widdowson's Arbitration Review – Phoenix from the Ashes” on her Climate of Hope Substack February 7, 2026 [https://michellestirlingg.substack.com/p/dr-frances-widdowsons-arbitration].
“It must have been Friday because the fish smell from the Mansion House coffee-shop next door was strong enough to build a garage on.”
Start of “Cinderella Suicide” (a John Dalmas story) in Raymond Chandler Killer in the Rain
“IN THE ENORMOUS BATTLE FOR THE HEARTS AND MINDS AND SOULS OF OUR CHILDREN, the modern education system has all the advantages of size, reach, funding, compulsion, and control. That system includes both public and private schools that operate alike and madly follow the latest fads and fashions and fallacies and offer less and less of the timeless truths. We can look around and see the devastating results everywhere: a populace with little literacy, no reasoning skills, no moral compass, no knowledge of the past, no appreciation for our cultural accomplishments, no common sense. They are glued to screens, awed by vapid celebrities, and stuck in dead-end jobs as wage slaves. They are wobbly and depressed, but also angry and inarticulate. They think in fragments, they talk in fragments. They are the product of our nation’s education system. But the thing about Goliath is that he is made to be toppled. The thing about David, who will defeat him, is that he sings songs unto the Lord.”
Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023) [including start].