“No theories and no pedantic statistics will ever prevent ordinary people from finding a meaning and a literature in their own lives: great tragedy when the baby dies; great comedy when the baby tries to eat the soap. We always take ourselves seriously; it is only learned men, in huge books, who take us frivolously, and make us feel like a swarm of flies.”

G.K. Chesterton in London Opinion April 2 1904, quoted in “Statistics” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)

“The muddle is not merely due to the sin of anger; that is, to people losing their tempers with each other. It is also due to the sin of sloth; to people not taking the trouble to listen to each other, or take note of what each other really says. My first point, therefore, is that sloth, intellectual sloth, as well as mere emotional anger, is a great modern foe to charity.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted, apparently from the BBC radio program “The Listener” in 1933, by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)

“In Biblical days it was considered a miracle for an ass to speak; but today it would be a miracle if one kept quiet.”

“POSSIBLY FROM SOMEONE IN MISSOURI, OR ELSE ABOUT SOMEONE IN MISSOURI” quoted in “Other Suspects – V” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025) p. 23.

“Humanity is far too complex to have calculations made about it.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 15, 1933, quoted in “Statistics” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)

“The London School of Economics would sponsor mock trials to aid the London hospitals, and Chesterton was invited to participate in a number of these, which always drew a large crowd (and thereby donations). On one occasion, he was pitted against several artists, charging them with constantly changing their standards so that a bewildered public knew not what to admire. Art was represented by Sir William Rothenstein, Eric Gill, and Sir Reginald Blomfield.... Blomfield, a famous architect, after hearing Chesterton’s opening argument, ‘deserted his colleagues and turned King’s Evidence.’”

Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)

“Becoming Catholic does not mean leaving off thinking; it means learning how to think.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted without further attribution as header quotation on Mercy Hudson’s contribution to their new “My Name is Lazarus” conversion story series in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #2 (Nov./Dec. 2024)

Having been called an Optimist in his youth because of his opposition to fashionable youth pessimism “after naturally enjoying the daylight, I came to be troubled with the twilight…. All that there is, in substance, on the other side, is a row of official optimists, boasting of the liberties they have not got, and defending the religion they do not believe.”

G.K. Chesterton somewhere in G.K’s Weekly Vol. 22 (3/10/35 to 12/3/36) quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #3 (Jan./Feb. 2025)

“Marching toward the present decade [from the history of the sexual revolution in the conflicting libertine and feminist versions], women are twice as likely as men to be on antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications.”

Amanda Hobbs in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #2 (Nov./Dec. 2024)