“Note the number of positive assertions made in the name of popular science, without the least pretence of scientific proof.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News July 12, 1930, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023) [and foretelling COVID, climate alarmism etc. with uncanny accuracy]

“The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.”

Elbert Hubbard according to www.quotationspage.com as of Dec. 10, 2005.

“On one thing, at least, the emperor and the apostle [Paul] were agreed: in a world newly touched by the divine, nothing could be quite as it had been before. Nero, as the son of a god and the ruler of the world, was not bound by the drab and wearisome conventions that govern the affairs of mortals. Instead, like some figure sprung from tragedy, he killed his mother; he kicked his pregnant wife to death; he was married, dressed as a woman, to a man. Such it was to live as a hero of myth. What, in a city ruled by a superhuman figure, were mere proprieties? Rome itself was rendered complicit in their repeated and spectacular subversion. In the summer of AD 64, a great street party was thrown to celebrate the new order of things. And the very heart of the city, the lake was filled with sea-monsters. Along its edge, brothels were staffed with whores ranging from the cheapest streetwalkers to the most blue-blooded of aristocrats. For a single night, to the delight of the men who visited them and knew that the women were forbidden to refuse anyone, there was no slave or free. ‘Now a minion would take his mistress in the presence of his master; now a gladiator would take a girl of noble family before the gaze of her father.’ Yet out in the vast sprawl of the capital, in the apartment blocks and workshops of the largest city in the world, there were scattered communities of people who, and their rejection of conventions and norms, put even Nero in the shade. Paul was not the founder of the churches in Rome. Believers in Christ had appeared well before his own arrival there. Nevertheless, the letter that he had sent these Hagioi from Corinth, a lengthy statement of his beliefs that was designed as well to serve as an introduction to ‘all in Rome who are loved by God’, was like nothing they had ever heard before. The most detailed of Paul’s career, it promised to its recipients a dignity more revolutionary than even any of Nero’s stunts.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“It’s discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”

Emailed by a friend Feb. 2, 2026 and attributed to Noel Coward, which is confirmed by https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/178186-it-s-discouraging-to-think-how-many-people-are-shocked-by saying

“Watching his video is perhaps the closest you will come to entering the mind of a banana without going near a fruit bowl.”

Bryony Gordon in www.telegraph.co.uk Jan. 18, 2008 [the video in question being Tom Cruise explaining Scientology].

“Whatever men have rightly said, no matter who or where, is the property of us Christians.”

Origen, who applied long-established scholarly methods of understanding ancient texts to Biblical ones, quoted in Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“In 1550, in a debate held in the Spanish city of Valladolid on whether or not the Indians were entitled to self-government, the aging Bartolomé de las Casas had more than held his own. Who were the true barbarians, he had demanded: the Indians, a people ‘gentle, patient and humble’, or the Spanish conquerors, whose lust for gold and silver was no less ravening than their cruelty? Pagan or not, every human being had been made equally by God and endowed by him with the same spark of reason. To argue, as Las Casas’ opponent had done, that the Indians were as inferior to Spaniards as monkeys were to men was a blasphemy, plain and simple. ‘All the peoples of the world are humans, and there is only one definition of all humans and of each one, that is that they are rational.’ Every mortal – Christian or not – had rights that derived from God. Derechos humanos, las Casas had termed them: ‘human rights’.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“Yet if this was the kind of talk that would see [the Marquis de] Sade spend his final years consigned to a lunatic asylum, the icy pitilessness of his gaze was not insanity. More clearly than many enthusiasts for enlightenment cared to recognize, he could see that the existence of human rights was no more provable than the existence of God.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.