“The opinions which nobody can agree with are mostly in the books that nobody can read.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted without further attribution as header quotation on the book review section of Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)

“Do you really want a safe place? Is that what you want? You want to be so weak that you want to be protected from threat. What the hell kind of life is that? You’re a paralyzed rabbit in a hole. That’s no life for a human being. You should be confronting danger and the unknown and malevolence. And the reason for that, too, is – this is the weird paradox – and I believe this is the paradox, first of all, that was discovered in part by Buddha but also laid forth very clearly in Christianity, which is that: The solution to the problem of tragedy and malevolence is the willingness to face them.”

Jordan Peterson on Instagram (audio and CC which I transcribed) Sept. 24, 2022 [https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ci5ZIf1pm5s/?igshid=YWZlMWU5YjI%3D].

“‘Those who can, do,’ but the converse, ‘those who do, can,’ is no less true, for we learn by doing.”

Anthony De Jasay The State (expressly regarding the possibility that we couldn’t spontaneously cooperate any more because we’ve lived under governments for so long).

“BY ONE OF THOSE QUEER [a word that used to mean “strange”] associations that nobody can ever understand, a large number of people have come to think that frivolity has some kind of connection with enjoyment. As a matter of fact, nobody can really enjoy himself unless he is serious.... Men can only enjoy fundamental things. In order to enjoy the lightest and most flying joke a man must be rooted in some basic sense of the good of things; and the good of things means, of course, the seriousness of things…. The really frivolous man, the frivolous man of society, we all know, and any of us who know him truthfully know that if he has one characteristic more salient than another it is that he is a pessimist.... Religion might approximately be defined as the power which makes us joyful about the things that matter. Fashionable frivolity might, with a parallel propriety, be defined as the power which makes us sad about the things that do not matter.”

G.K. Chesterton “The Frivolous Man” reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 3-4/22

In my latest Epoch Times column I call the rather vague Wall Street Journal article about a U.S. government report on the COVID lab leak theory very good news because it means the possibility is being debated not cancelled.

“‘Lieutenant, how would you handle this?’ ‘We could try ignoring it, sir.’ ‘I see. Pretend nothing has happened and hope everything turns out all right in the morning?’ ‘Just a thought, sir.’ ‘I’ve considered that. There’s got to be a better angle.’”

Cdr. Buck Murdock (William Shatner) and Lt. Pervis in Airplane 2

“Way back in 1938 Walt Disney had some inspiring words about children’s entertainment: ‘everybody in the world was once a child. So in planning a new picture, we don’t think of grown-ups, and we don’t think of children, but just of that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us that maybe the world has made us forget and that maybe our pictures can help recall.’ Going on a hundred years later, the company which he founded seems to have forgotten about ‘that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us’.”

Editor Michael Cook’s note in email from Mercatornet April 1, 2022, teasing to a Kurt Mahlburg article.

On retiring he was planning to start reading and contemplating. But while the contemplative life is important “in what sense could one man’s contemplative life take on such grandiose proportions that it could be viewed as ‘for the good of human society’? Most of the ‘solitary contemplatives’ I know these days are pondering stuff a good bit removed from the ‘good of human society.’… It was at this critical log jam in my thinking that my wife earned her keep, signing me up at church for a ‘men’s group.’ I was initially skeptical, to say the least. Participation in such groups has always struck me as something akin to walking on red-hot coals. I have visions of guys dropping all their comfortable, manly gruff and gusto, squeamishly ‘sharing’ stories of personal picadilloes best kept to themselves, just before they completely unman themselves with a torrent of tears. But it didn’t turn out that way at all. This ‘men’s group’ was instead a first cousin to the bookish life – a Shakespeare reading group, where for three years now our little band of brothers has read from the Bard’s best every Sunday night, shouted hearty toasts over ale, and argued ad infinitum (in a very masculine manner), about the meaning of the very masculine life!”

Mark Johnson in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 3-4/22