“Business is taboo at the dinner table, but crime and criminals aren’t, and the Rosenberg case hogged the conversation all through the anchovy fritters, partridge in casserole with no olives in the sauce, cucumber mousse, and Creole curds and cream. Of course it was academic, since the Rosenbergs had been dead for years, but the young princes had been dead for five centuries, and [Nero] Wolfe had once spent a week investigating that case, after which he removed More’s Utopia from his bookshelves because More had framed Richard III.”

Archie Goodwin’s internal monologue in Rex Stout Death of a Doxy; Wolfe had been reading Invitation to an Inquest and had ordered a transcript of the trial.

“There are certain birds, like the kite and the crow, that people disregard entirely and would never bother to criticize; it is precisely because the uguisu is usually held in such high regard that people find fault with it when they can.”

Sei Shonagon The Pillow Book

“We are incessantly told that past periods were very bad; and I cheerfully agree that they must have been most horribly bad, if they were really worse than the period we are asked to praise.”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly January 18, 1930 quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)

“Fat constituted a menace to his own well-being, a charge that could be brought against many people.”

Philip K. Dick VALIS [re his alter ego Horselover Fat being locked up via a “‘danger to yourself’” law]

“For forms of government let fools contest:/ Whate’er is best administer’d is best:/ For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight;/ His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right;/ In faith and hope the world will disagree,/ But all mankind’s concern is charity:/ All must be false that thwart this one great end,/ And all of God that bless mankind or mend.”

Alexander Pope “Essay on Man”

In my latest National Post column I say we need a mature and courteous response to the American retreat into isolationism, not emotionally gratifying childish outbursts of petulant fantasy.

“A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense has really become very uncommon. Straightforward ideas appear strange and unfamiliar, and any thought that does not follow the conventional curve or twist, is supposed to be a sort of joke.”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly November 2, 1933 quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)

“Jane Austen’s wonderful quip: ‘For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?’”

Mark Johnson in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024) [It turns out to be the long-suffering father of the Bennett girls in Pride and Prejudice]