“If the dogmas are true, what can you do but try to get men to agree with them?”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News Feb. 13, 1906, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“Go back to the idea of government by ideas.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Revolt Against Ideas,” in The Thing, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #6 (4-5/07)
In my latest Epoch Times column I praise people for observing the externals of Christmas then urge them to open their hearts, minds and ears just a little wider while singing carols.
“He [Harvard chaplain Peter J. Gomes] is surely right that extermination, conversion, and demoralizing relativism are not the only options. The best of options is a particular tradition with truth claims that exclude contradictory truth claims and include the truth claim that the dignity of the human person means that all human beings, no matter how erroneous their beliefs, are to be engaged with love and respect.”
Richard John Neuhaus in First Things December 2006 (#168)
“Many even of the sexual anarchists are already weary of the sexual anarchy, and are groping towards a more respectable relation. But they are groping for it rather than grasping it; because their previous prejudice had been all to the effect that respectability must never be respected.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly July 12, 1935, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”
Alexander Pope quoted in “Random Foolish Quotations” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 # 7 (June 2004) [and yes, I know you know it, but in addition to being worthy of recall it’s interesting to know where it came from].
“a favorite theme of Chesterton, namely the vacuity of the mind of the man of no dogmas.”
Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #7 (June 2000)
“‘There is no nation so atheistic that it does not attribute a sanctity to two gods, the dead man and the woman in travail.’”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Fr. James V. Schall. S.J. in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #1 (Sept. 04) [apparently originally in “The Mystery of Patriotism” in The Commonwealth Jan. 19, 1902]