“‘The two greatest problems in history,’ says a brilliant scholar of our time, are ‘how to account for the rise of Rome, and how to account for her fall.’ We may come nearer to understanding them if we remember that the fall of Rome, like her rise, had not one cause but many, and was not an event but a process spread over 300 years. Some nations have not lasted as long as Rome fell. A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome’s decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars. Christian writers were keenly appreciative of this decay.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

In my latest National Post column I condemn Canadians’ support for compulsory youth service to give us free money not defend freedom.

“The truth is that the Imperial movement going on around us has few of the marks of patriotism. Above all, it lacks one essential quality, and closely connected with the sense of sudden antiquity of which I have spoken, a quality which it is very difficult, perhaps, accurately to define. Perhaps the best phrase for it would be an exultant melancholy. These old war ballads do not dwell upon victory to anything like the extent to which they dwell upon defeat, disaster, the darkness which alone leaves visible the single star of fidelity. The hero of all these songs is not the triumphant hero in the car; their hero is the last man by the flag. The only strong nation and the only strong empire is the nation or the empire that has before it continually this vision of its own final disaster and its own final defiance. There is no success for anything which we do not love more than success. There lies in patriotism, as in every form of love, a great peril, a peril of self-committal, which, while it scares the prudent, fascinates the brave. But this spirit of noble peril and melancholy, which runs from end to end of the patriotic poetry of the world, is just the note which is lacking in current Imperial patriotism…”

G.K. Chesterton in “Patriotic Poetry” in Daily News Nov. 29, 1901, reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)

In my latest Epoch Times column I ridicule the government for thinking the solution to the taxman riding roughshod over citizens’ rights is to get him bigger boots.

“no Roman citizen, as every reader of the Acts of the Apostles knows, could be scourged, tortured, or put to death over his appeal to the emperor.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ [and everyone knew it then, Christian or not, whereas nowadays I wouldn’t count on most state-educated people to understand any part of that sentence]

“But in reality, the more there was to do the better. I never ceased contriving fresh improvements, being fully aware of the importance of strengthening and maintaining the health of mind and body. This, indeed, with a consciousness of continual progress toward a desirable end, is found to constitute the main element of happiness.”

Johann David Wyss, Swiss Family Robinson

“All in all, no more attractive religion has ever been presented to mankind. It offered itself without restriction to all individuals, classes, at nations; It was not limited to one people, like Judaism, nor to the freemen of one state, like the official cults of Greece and Rome. By making all men heirs of Christ’s victory over death, Christianity announced the basic equality of men, and made transiently trivial all differences of earthly degree. To the miserable, maimed, bereaved, disheartened, and humiliated it brought the new virtue of compassion, and an ennobling dignity; it gave them the inspiring figure, story, and ethic of Christ; it brightened their lives with the hope of the coming Kingdom, and have endless happiness beyond the grave. To even the greatest sinners it promised forgiveness, and their full acceptance into the community of the saved. To minds harassed with the insoluble problems of origin and destiny, evil and suffering, it brought a system of divinely revealed doctrine in which the simplest soul could find mental rest. To men and women imprisoned in the prose of poverty and toil it brought the poetry of the sacraments and the Mass, a ritual that made every major event of life of vital scene in the moving drama of God and man. Into the moral vacuum of a dying paganism, into the coldness of Stoicism and the corruption of Epicureanism, into a world sick of brutality, cruelty, oppression, and sexual chaos, into a pacified empire that seemed no longer to need the masculine virtues or the gods of war, it brought a new morality of brotherhood, kindliness, decency, and peace. So molded to men’s wants, the new faith spread with fluid readiness.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ [being a very modern man, he avoids drawing the obvious conclusion]

“G.K. Chesterton – there was a bright guy – said, ‘I don’t take myself seriously, but I take my work seriously’”.

Chuck Jones, the animation legend from Warner Bros. who cocreated Bugs Bunny etc., at age 80, quoted in Maclean’s June 14, 1993