“I may have some natural talent, but I don’t rely on it. That’s why I work 18 hours a day.”
Edward Greenspan quoted in Maclean’s Jan. 17, 2000
“The creation of a new creature, not ourselves, of a new conscious center, of a new and independent focus of experience and enjoyment, is an immeasurably more grand and godlike act even than a real love affair; how much more superior to a momentary physical satisfaction. If creating another self is not noble, why is pure self-indulgence nobler?”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly Sept. 27, 1930, quoted in “Why Do You Keep Asking Me Rhetorical Questions?” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)
In my latest Epoch Times column I unearth and reprint a set of principles I outlined when the 21st century was young and fresh to guide is through an uncertain future, and claim that I have been largely vindicated. I also challenge my fellow pundits to do likewise (and scoff at politicians’ forecasts) because I say you should listen to the person who gets it right not the one who offers soothing but inaccurate platitudes.
“he is a self-styled public-relations counselor – one of the various modern activities that are an insult to the dignity of man.”
Nero Wolfe to Inspector Cramer about Floyd Vance in Rex Stout The Father Hunt
“No one could possibly imagine that the Last Supper would be singled out for such grotesque disparagement as it was in Paris last week by people who actually believed that the central figure in the Last Supper really was whipped almost to death and nailed upon a cross until he died. No one, no matter how depraved or degraded, could possibly find such a horrible event remotely amusing. The agreeable aspect of it, the ‘fun’ that our media detected in it, was the pitifully adolescent thrill of a send-up of a starkly mortifying event that more than a billion people unselfconsciously consider to have been one of the most notable encounters there has ever been between man and his Creator. The thrill and the fun are to be found in rendering repulsive and perverted an occasion that a vast number of worthy and in very many cases, exceptionally accomplished and intellectually sophisticated people regard as a sacred moment when the divinely inspired missionary of the deity was among us and about to make an overwhelming sacrifice for the moral betterment of mankind. It is intellectual vandalism, iconoclastic churlishness, like the young mountebank Mussolini looking heavenwards like King Lear and bellowing to an appreciative crowd ‘I say you don’t exist; if you do strike me down, God.’ (Possibly the Duce remembered this as he and his mistress were executed by communist guerrillas prior to being hung upside down by their ankles and their corpses desecrated in a gas station in Milan in April 1945.)”
Conrad Black in National Post August 3, 2024
“Don’t criticize, critique.”
Slogan suggested to me by some one whose name I didn’t record, around April 1999.
“Pluralism grows out of the same general mentality as historicism. It compounds the problem by advocating simultaneous as well as successive relativism.”
Avery Robert Cardinal Dulles The New World of Faith
“The only way to end a quarrel is to get on both sides of it. We must have not merely a calm impartiality, but rather a sympathy with partiality as it exists in both partisans. We must be not so much impartial as partial to both sides.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 25, 1932, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)