“Hi John,/ Is your email deliverability in good health?”
Start of email from Mailchimp Oct. 1, 2025 [prompting my retort "better than your syntax"]
“The first impulse of an enlightened person on hearing the proposal to broadcast the debates of Parliament is merely that it is one of the typical triumphs of modern science. It is telling us that everybody can listen to what nobody wants to hear.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 5, 1925, quoted in “Radio (and TV and Movies)” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #3 (Jan./Feb. 2025)
“It is psychologically impossible, when we hear real scientific statistics, not to think that they mean something. Generally they mean nothing. Sometimes they mean something that isn’t true.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Nov. 18, 1905, quoted in “Statistics” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“Inevitably, if death is to be conquered, and if humanity is defined by its mortality, then humanity must go. This isn’t an extrapolation; he admits as much that man is a ‘temporary stage along the evolutionary pathway.’ Just like Mr. Shaw, transhumanists would ‘throw over humanity with all its limitations’ rather than discard their own philosophy. They are loyal to their own philosophy, not to our shared humanity. And just when we realize where their loyalties lie, More contradicts these very loyalties with an ironic admission: ‘There can be no final, ultimate, correct philosophy of life.’ It is a line so perfectly self-refuting that we need only quote it and smile.”
Brady Stiller reviewing Max More’s essay “Transhumanism: Towards a Futurist Philosophy” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“We are not very credulous about statistics. It was in some ways unfortunate when men found they could tell lies in Arabic numerals as well as in Roman letters.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly May 12, 1928, quoted in “Statistics” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“If you leave your children a world where you never stood up, they’ll inherit one where they can’t.”
Emailed as an image and without attribution by a friend Sept. 8, 2025
“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)
“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)