“‘Such phantoms as the dignity of man, the dignity of labour’: these were Christian through and through. Nietzsche did not mean this is a compliment. It was not just as frauds that he despised those who clung to Christian morality, even as their knives were dripping with the blood of God; he loathed them as well for believing in it. Concern for the lowly and the suffering, far from serving the cause of justice, was a form of poison. Nietzsche, more radically than many a theologian, had penetrated to the heart of everything that was most shocking about the Christian faith.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [though I have come to believe that Holland, like nearly everyone, misreads Nietzsche as celebrating what he was in fact trying desperately to warn about].

“Our motive may be taken to be the desire to serve our day and generation in the way that seems nearest to our hand. The battle is not always to the strong nor the race to the swift. Victory in war cannot be counted upon but what can be counted upon is that we should go forward determined to do what we can to bring this war to the end which we believe best for our friends and comrades in arms, without boastfulness or forgetting our duty, resolved to do the right so far as we can see the right.”

Part of Orde Wingate’s words to the Chindits as they set out into Burma in February 1943, quoted in Karen Farrington Victory in the Pacific: Pearl Harbor to the Fall of Okinawa [and note the contrast with the tone and content of totalitarian wartime or for that matter peacetime rhetoric].

“From everyone at C2C Journal, we hope you have had a very Merry Christmas or Happy Chanukah and are enjoying the holidays. This time of year probably best reflects the observation that ‘the supply of politics is greater than the demand.’ Even intellectually engaged, savvy C2C readers need a break from the rough and tumble of our era’s divisive, bitter – and never-ending – partisan politics.”

George Koch, Editor-in-Chief of C2C, in an email Dec. 28, 2025.

“I fully agree with Leo Tolstoy when he said more or less the following: ‘People say it’s shameful to change one’s convictions. But I say: it’s shameful not to.’”

Vladimir Voinovich The Anti-Soviet Soviet Union

“We must not suppose that the appearance of the world is the same today as it was before sin.”

Martin Luther, quoted in Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [as part of a discussion of growing interest in geology from the 16th century on, including clergymen both arguing for a young earth and using fossils etc. to prove it was old].

“Sanctified people got more fire.”

Musician James Brown, who grew up in the flamboyant evangelical United House of Prayer for All People of the Church on the Rock of the Apostolic Faith, quoted in Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“His jokes may be much worse in your opinion than they are in his opinion; but after all they must be jokes; they cannot be entirely shapeless mysteries, like many modern works of philosophy.”

G.K. Chesterton in “Sherlock Holmes” in A Handful of Authors, quoted in “Can’t You Take A Joke?” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

“No wise man will wish to bring more long words into the world.”

G.K. Chesterton “The War of the Gods and Demons” in The Everlasting Man quoted in “Everlasting” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)