“It is now much discussed among the learned whether art should abolish morality by calling it convention. It might well be discussed among the wise whether art should even abolish convention. But what seems very queer to me is this: that modern art has so often abolished morality without abolishing convention.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News February 6, 1932, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #1 (9-10/22).
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the mercifully now reversed decision by Moncton city council to ditch their traditional Hanukkah acknowledgement (and a nativity scene) reflects a dangerously mistaken understanding of the place of religion in a free society.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the recent riots in Ireland are a warning sign about what happens when normal people feel that their core concerns are deliberately excluded from the political process.
“If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is a part of yourself. What isn’t a part of ourselves doesn’t hurt us.”
Herman Hesse in Demian, quoted by John Thompson in Mackenzie Newsletter #31 January 1998
In my latest National Post column I say the tendency of Western feminists to side with Hamas, to the point of denying systematic rape during the Oct. 7 attack, reveals starkly that something is extremely wrong with an ideology that claims to be motivated by love and compassion.
“Freddy’s eyebrows rose. ‘How did you know we’re not from New York?’ ‘I’m awake at the moment. What’ll it be?’”
The reply is from the old bartender, in Spider Robinson Time Travellers Strictly Cash
“Distrust every poet who says to you, ‘I do not know where this came from.’ The proper answer is, ‘We none of us know where it comes from, but you have got to know where it is going to.’ You have got to have an image to be evoked before the end; and to work up to that from the beginning. In that sense, all good poetry is written backwards. That is exactly the difference between the inspired poet and the inspiring poet. The bad, or inspired, poet, lets the first lines dictate the last lines. The good, or inspiring, poet, lets the last lines dictate the first.”
G.K. Chesterton in New York American November 19, 1932, quoted in “Chesterton’s Mail Bag” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)
“There is, however, another good work that is done by detective stories. While it is the constant tendency of the Old Adam to rebel against so universal and automatic a thing as civilization, to preach departure and rebellion, the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions. By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates. When the detective in a police romance stands alone, and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves’ kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful knighterrancy. This form of art, like every form of art down to a comic song, has the whole truth of the universe behind it.”
G.K. Chesterton in “In Defence of Detective Stories” in The Defendant, quoted by Fr. Robert Wild in a piece on Catherine Doherty in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)