“Of course, it would be worth while to pay a big price to get a well-informed people. At the present moment we are paying an abominably big price to get a more and more ill-informed people.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly, as header quotation on Dale Ahlquist “Chesterton University” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“The first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship from a corkscrew to a cathedral is to know what it is – what it was intended to do, and how it is meant to be used. After that has been discovered, the temperance reformer may decide that the corkscrew was made for a bad purpose, and the communist may think the same about the cathedral. But such questions come later. The first thing to understand first thing is to understand the object before you: as long as you think the corkscrew is meant for opening tins or the cathedral for entertaining tourists you can say nothing to the purpose about them. The first thing the reader needs to know about Paradise Lost is what Milton meant it to be.”
The opening paragraph of A Preface to Paradise Lost by C.S. Lewis, quoted in Harry Lee Poe, The Making of C.S. Lewis [and how relevant to reactions by proudly atheist French politicians when Notre Dame de Paris caught fire].
“Scholars have spread much darkness” “soon we shall know nothing at all”
Mark Twain, quoted by Nicholas Davidson in Chronicles magazine September 1988 [and it can be found elsewhere online but nobody seems to know what connected the two halves and no one offers a more detailed source; so if he did not say it, and maybe he did not, he missed a good chance].
In my latest Epoch Times column I said the scariest thing about the current debate over social programs is that there isn’t one. We tried 30 years ago, realized it was hard, gave up and spent our way to economic and social ruin.
“Literature is not supposed to be God Almighty summing up at the end of the world. It is supposed to be somebody telling a story about somebody else.”
G.K. Chesterton “Report of a speech, Glasgow Herald, Feb. 7, 1910”, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)
“To be considered stupid and to be told so is more painful than being called gluttonous, mendacious, violent, lascivious, lazy, cowardly: every weakness, every vice, has found its defenders, its rhetoric, its ennoblement and exaltation, but stupidity hasn’t.”
Primo Levi, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail Feb. 25, 2004
“In chapter 13 [of A Preface to Paradise Lost], C.S. Lewis… discussed the tendency, since the time of William Blake and Percy Shelley for critics to regard Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost. Lewis put this idea in its place through an examination of the self-delusion of Satan as one who regarded himself as the injured party, and by reference to Milton's theology. Lewis declared, ‘We know from his prose works that [Milton] believed everything detestable to be, in the long run, also ridiculous; and mere Christianity commits every Christian to believing that “the devil is (in the long run) an ass”.’ Lewis said that we see the same ridiculous trait of the ‘Sense of Injured Merit’ in a variety of familiar situations: the spoiled child, the film star, politicians, and minor poets.”
Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis
“Then he [C.S. Lewis] made a remarkable observation that would appear in several of his apologetics books later. The death of the gods into allegorical figures had not happened because of Christianity, for the dissatisfaction with the old gods had been growing since the time of Socrates. Lewis said that ‘monotheism should not be regarded as the rival of polytheism, but rather as its maturity.’”
Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis [re and quoting from The Allegory of Love].