“I like a look of Agony because I know it’s true.”
Emily Dickenson quoted in Thomas Boswell How Life Imitates the World Series
“Kevin Costner, who throughout the movie [Message in a Bottle] displays the sensitivity and eloquence of a pizza deliveryman.”
John Simon in National Review March 22, 1999
In a talk to the 2024 Economic Education Association of Alberta "Freedom Talk" in Red Deer, AB on July 7 I argue that a radical commitment to truth-telling, including refusing to remain silent in the face of lies, is crucial to personal and to political freedom.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the International Olympic Committee’s pseudo-apology for deliberately blaspheming the Last Supper was even more debauched than the initial performance.
“No sooner has a man’s conscience told him to doubt a certain institution than the man’s modern intelligence immediately tells him to doubt his conscience. Thus most modern revolution is in secret revolt against itself.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News Nov. 17 1906, quoted in “Intelligence” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)
“I did but prompt the age to quit their cloggs/ By the known rules of antient libertie,/ When strait a barbarous noise environs me/ Of Owles and Cuckoos, Asses, Apes and Doggs.”
John Milton On the Detraction Which Follow’d Upon My Writing Certain Treatises
“If Nature herself is so kind a mother, why should anybody be so pessimistic as to shrink from motherhood?”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News August 26, 1922, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“Theological distinctions are fine but not thin. In all the mess of modern thoughtlessness that still calls itself modern thought, there is perhaps nothing so stupendously stupid as the common saying, ‘Religion can never depend on minute disputes about doctrine.’ It is like saying that life can never depend on minute disputes about medicine. The man who is content to say, ‘We do not want theologians splitting hairs’ will doubtless be content to go on and say, ‘We do not want surgeons splitting filaments more delicate than hairs.’ It is the fact that many a man would be dead today, if his doctors had not debated fine shades about doctoring. It is also the fact that European civilization would be dead today, if its doctors of divinity had not debated fine shades about doctrine.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Story of the Statues” in The Resurrection of Rome, quoted in “Chesterton’s Mail Bag” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #3 (Nov.-Dec. 2007)