“Fools can be found to support anything…”
Theodore Dalrymple in National Review November 20, 2006 [specifically re people who call the niqab liberating for women].
“Never get mad at anybody for knowing more than you do. It’s not their fault.”
“Elizabethtown (KENTUCKY) News” quoted in “Other Suspects I Quotes not by GKC” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #2 (Nov./Dec. 2024)
“[W]e are learning to do a great many clever things. Unless we are much mistaken the next great task will be to learn not to do them.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted in “News With Views” “compiled by Mark Pilon” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025) [the specific context is using CRISPR to bring back extinct animals].
“We are not very credulous about statistics. It was in some ways unfortunate when men found they could tell lies in Arabic numerals as well as in Roman letters.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly May 12, 1928, quoted in “Statistics” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“If someone asks him how he [extremely productive historian Niall Ferguson] manages his time, he says, ‘I get up in the morning and work. My puzzle is with people who spend 10 years not producing a book. What do they do?’”
National Post March 14, 2001
“Carroll’s widow, Anne... told us that G.K. Chesterton was not only fundamental to Warren Carroll’s thinking but to the philosophy on which he founded the college [Christendom College, in Fort Royal, VA, home to the world’s largest thurifer]. His two great precepts – ‘Truth exists’ and ‘The Incarnation happened’ – are engraved on his tombstone. Anne said, ‘That is distilling G.K. Chesterton into five words. Truth exists, the Incarnation happened.’”
Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“If you leave your children a world where you never stood up, they’ll inherit one where they can’t.”
Emailed as an image and without attribution by a friend Sept. 8, 2025
“Lewis spoke to these questions two years before he and Tolkien launched their barbed wire university [it was under the British Red Cross/Order of Saint John of Jerusalem “Joint War Organisation” “Educational Books Section” program]. In a sermon titled ‘Learning in War-Time,’ which he preached at Oxford’s Church of St. Mary the Virgin on October 22, 1939, he addressed whether humanistic learning was irresponsible when England faced hellish threats and Europe’s liberties hung in the balance. If in the past ‘men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure,’ Lewis observed, ‘the search would never have begun.’ We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life,’ he continued, adding ‘Life has never been normal.’ Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the last new poem while advancing the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. And – he could have added a few years later – strive for an Oxford ‘First’ in English Literature, while imprisoned in a Nazi POW camp. Why does man make such efforts – search for truth and beauty in the midst of great adversity? Lewis’ response is simple: ‘This is not panache, it is our nature.’”
Mark Johnson in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)