In my latest Epoch Times column I say real “remembrance” must include remembering to be ready for the next round of big trouble in our little world.
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say the repellent UN “Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territories occupied since 1967” has a point that Canadian politicians must either walk the walk on their “decolonizing” talk or walk it back.
“When Mr. Chesterton visited Warsaw recently the papers stated that he was accompanied from the station to his quarters by a squadron of glittering Polish cavalry: a pleasing attention, only his due, and one that I am sure he heartily appreciated. But a thoroughly adequate escort for him would include not merely armed horsemen, but cohorts of magicians, clowns, princesses, priests, kings, vegetarians, Puritans, drunkards, landlords, politicians, millionaires, minstrels out of which he has made the fairy-tale world of his poems. The fairy-tales always have a point; it was long ago said that Mr. Chesterton’s value as a moralist was largely based on the fact that he made virtue amusing. Yet even when he is most vigorously jousting against slimy monsters or caitiff knights his spear usually has a few balloons tied on to it, and can be used, when he tires of the more formal tourney, as a quarterstaff or even a slapstick. His jests are mingled with his protestations of anger and love … he has one foot in fairyland and another in Fleet Street …”
The now-forgotten J.C. Squire in 1927, quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)
In the Epoch Times this week I praised Tom Holland’s Dominion for arguing compellingly that values we consider universal, such as “human rights”, are actually specifically Judeo-Christian in origin and I warned that they are unlikely to survive the ongoing loss of faith.
“It isn’t silent majorities that drive things, but vocal minorities. Don’t count heads; count decibels.”
George Jonas in National Post May 4, 2013 [as part of “A reader asks if I have learned some ‘home truths’ in three decades of commenting on world affairs. I think I have. Here are a few, in no particular order”]
“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].