“Il y a des folies qui se prennent comme les maladies contagieuses.”
La Rochefoucauld Maximes [Réflexions morales #300]
“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)
“Come join the party”
Slogan that came to me regarding the need to be cheerful in policy polemics and struggles during a conversation June 25, 2025.
“Fools can be found to support anything…”
Theodore Dalrymple in National Review November 20, 2006 [specifically re people who call the niqab liberating for women].
“[W]e are learning to do a great many clever things. Unless we are much mistaken the next great task will be to learn not to do them.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted in “News With Views” “compiled by Mark Pilon” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025) [the specific context is using CRISPR to bring back extinct animals].
“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)
“Sex is not quite so simple in practice as it is in theory.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted by Dale Ahlquist, possibly from the BBC radio program “The Listener” in 1933, in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #6 (July/August 2025)
“Many believed Lord Acton when he quipped that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This throwaway line has become one of our governing principles, so much so that Australia, and much of the West, organize virtually everything by committee and quail in the face of individual thumos outside of sport. We are suspicious of it. We see in every Great Man the shadow of the slave master. Nonetheless, power must be wielded... The wise man recognizes that life has fullest meaning in service to a good master, and that we all serve something — if not something or someone noble, then our appetites. Wartime is the most direct and prime example of service to masters; it is antiegalitarian in their sense, but egalitarian in ours, and together bound by duty and service in the most primordial sense. Against this the pseudo-liberated contemporary person feels a degree of contempt, which is why they enjoy stories of soldiers committing massacres so dearly. Nothing confirms their deepest-held beliefs more sordidly. Good masters are few and far between, because we no longer cultivate this ethic in our technocratic managerial elite. The truth is that in fleeing good masters we have not fled masters, but have merely ended up with bad ones. In attempting to achieve a self-reliant anarchy we have left open the door to those who are in fact most corruptible by power.”
Christopher Jolliffe “The Attack on ANZAC Day” in Dorchester Review #32 (Vol. 15 #2 Summer 2025)