“For as Chesterton remarked, you cannot introduce anarchy into the intellect without also introducing anarchy into the commonwealth.”
Link Byfield in British Columbia Report November 17, 1997
“Ladborough discovered that Lewis got on well with the college servants, who respected and admired him as a person without realizing that he was, in Ladborough’s words, ‘a great man.’ They called him a real gentleman, for he seemed to care about them. This manner of his reflects his greatness. He was not great because of the books he wrote; he wrote the kind of books he wrote because he was great.”
Harry Lee Poe The Completion of C.S. Lewis
“The reasonable people (for I know some quite reasonable people who allow me to talk to them), the rationalists, the liberal progressive people all say, ‘The Indian need is Independence; it must be a self-governing unit,’ and so on. Then they both say, ‘Let us hope no silly squabbles about religion will spoil this great unity,’ whether Imperial or National. Now I am so perverse that I think the religious squabbles are much less silly than the political squabbles. I am much more certain that there is such a thing as Islam than there is such a thing as India. I believe much more in the existence of a Hindoo than in the existence of an Indian. And I think the difficulties do arise from the doctrines; but much more from the trick of ignoring the doctrines.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Thing They Left Out” in the New York American January 9, 1932 reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
James “Madison was the Father of the Constitution, Architect of the Bill of Rights, and the only Secretary of State never to have left the country. The oldest of 12 children, he could read and write in seven languages. He attended the College of New Jersey (which became Princeton) instead of William and Mary – where Jefferson went and got all those Scottish Enlightenment Ideas.”
Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)
“The modern laxity of language has had a great deal to do with the ultimate laxity of conduct.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly July 4, 1931 quoted in “More About Language” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
“Honesty is never solemn; it is only hypocrisy that can be that. Honesty always laughs, because things are so laughable.”
G.K. Chesterton “A Plea for Hasty Journalism” in The Apostle and the Wild Ducks, quoted in “Can’t You Take A Joke?” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
“It helps a lot, with two people as much together as he and I were, if they understand each other. He understood that I was too strong-minded to add another word unless he told me to, and I understood that he was too pigheaded to tell me to.”
Archie Goodwin’s internal monologue himself and Nero Wolfe in Rex Stout The Final Deduction
“By virtue of his status as the Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, the Nobel Committee invited Lewis to submit a nomination for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1961. Lewis had several possible candidates on his mind: E.M. Forster, T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and his old friend Tolkien. It probably did not take much reflection to settle on Tolkien. Lewis’s letters of the previous ten years are strewn with references to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings prior to and after its publication, and his commendation of it to anyone who could read. However Tolkien might have felt about Lewis after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and his marriage to Joy, Lewis continued to admire and miss his friend. The Nobel Committee did not agree with Lewis, preferring to present the prize in 1961 to Ivo Andrić of Yugoslavia.”
Harry Lee Poe The Completion of C.S. Lewis (and I defy anyone to name a work by “Ivo Andrić of Yugoslavia” or, indeed, any recent recepient of this supposedly prestigious award).