Posts in Famous quotes
Words Worth Noting - July 3, 2025

“That the issue of sexual morality should become a vehicle of rebellion against bourgeois values for the modern movement was inevitable. In the art of Gustav Klimt, in the early operas of Richard Strauss, in the plays of Frank Wedekind, in the personal antics of Verlaine, Tchaikovsky, and Wilde, and even in the relaxed morality of the German youth movement, a motif of eroticism dominated the search for newness and change. In the United States Max Eastman shouted, ‘Lust is sacred!’ The sexual rebel, particularly the homosexual, became a central figure in the imagery of revolt, especially after the ignominious treatment Oscar Wilde received at the hands of the establishment. Of her Bloomsbury circle of gentle rebels Virginia Woolf said, ‘the word bugger was never far from our lips.’ Andre Gide, after a long struggle with himself, denounced publicly le mensonge des moeurs, the moral life, and admitted his own predilections. Passion and love, he had concluded, were mutually exclusive. And passion was much purer than love. Diaghilev’s sexual proclivities were well known, and he made no attempt to mask them; quite the reverse. Stravinsky said later that Diaghilev’s entourage was ‘a kind of homosexual Swiss Guard.’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era [so the modern rebellion over the issue of sexual morality is actually stale and reactionary]

Words Worth Noting - July 2, 2025

“Indeed, I think it [the turn to autocracy or worse because of the failings of democracy especially under “the Party System”] is part of the one big blunder that is at the back of all our blunders. It is hard to put it shortly, except by calling it the blunder of being Practical. Perhaps the nearest word is Opportunism; but it is not the sane opportunism that takes all opportunities to advance a great thing; it is the nervy and panicky opportunism that accepts all the small things because they have more opportunities. It is this yielding to the apparently practical that has ruined everything.”

G.K. Chesterton “The True Fascist Fallacy” reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)

Words Worth Noting - June 28, 2025

“I go slap through a roomful of MSS., criticizing deuced conscientiously, with the result that I post back some years of MSS. to addresses, which I should imagine, must be private asylums.”

G.K. Chesterton writing to E.C. Bentley (the Clerihew guy) in 1895 describing his workday and the various tasks he undertakes for a publishing house, Redway, including clearing a backlog of manuscripts, quoted in Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton

Words Worth Noting - June 26, 2025

“Running along both sides of the building’s arcade, a series of verses disparaged the doctrine of the Trinity. ‘The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was only a messenger of God.’ This was not merely to reopen theological debates that Christians had thought settled centuries before, but to condemn the entire New Testament, Gospels and all, as a fabrication. Squabbles among those who had written it, so the Dome of the Rock sternly declared, had polluted the original teachings of Jesus. These, like the revelations granted prophets before him, Abraham, and Moses, and David, had originally been identical to those for claimed by Muhammad. There was only the one true deen, the one true expression of allegiance to God, and that was submission to him: in Arabic, islam. Here was a doctrine with which ‘Muslims’ – those who practice islam – were already well familiar. It was not only to be found emblazoned on buildings. Most of the verses on the Dome of the Rock derived from a series of revelations that Muhammad’s followers believed had been given him by none other than the angel Gabriel. These, assembled after his death to form a single ‘recitation’ or qur’an, constituted for his followers what Jesus represented to Christians: an intrusion into the mortal world, into the sublunar, into the diurnal, of the divine.... This gave its pronouncement on Christians, as on everything else, an awful and irrevocable force.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World