“A man always says exactly what he means, but especially when he hides it.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Unmentionable Man” in The Paradoxes of Mr. Pound, quoted in “The Paradoxes of Mr. Pound” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025)
“The poet Rainer Maria Rilke and many others bowed in humble and awed obeisance to the ‘War God.’ Und wir? Glühen in Eines zusammen,/ In ein neues Geschöpf, das er tödlich belebt.* [“*And we? We glow as One/ A new creature invigorated by death.”] Invigoration by death: such was Germany's ‘rite of spring.’”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“he was the very personification of the cad who haunts the racecourse and who lives not so much by his own wits as by the lack of them in others.”
Baroness Orczy “The York Mystery” in Alan K. Russell, ed., Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
“Man arrested, accused of trespassing naked in Disneyland”
Headline in San Bernardino Sun April 14, 2025 [which offers the comfort that someone’s always having a worse day than you are but also the caution that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse.]
“The inclination here was to regard the war as a form of art, as a superior representation of life: only when mankind recognized that salvation lay in aesthetic values, in the symbolism of life and death, and not in sterile social norms, would the horror and sadness have meaning and be overcome. As evocation, as an instrument of change, the war had a positive purpose – that was the judgment of many artists, at least early on. The most radical artistic response to the war came from a group of people who made a complete break with traditional loyalties and gathered in neutral Zürich in 1915 to found there the Dada idea – if one can speak of this nihilistic manifestation as an idea. The cohort had an international flavor but its core was German.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“The BBC reports that the North Hertfordshire Museum will now refer to Roman emperor Elagabalus with the female pronounces of she and her.”
Mark Pilon in “News with Views” “Compiled by Mark Pilon” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025)
“it isn’t oratory that is wanted in this racket. The William Jennings Bryan stunt languishes in wartime.”
John Blenkiron in John Buchan Greenmantle
“When I was growing up, I had no idea what Black Sabbath was, but you better believe I knew about Ozzy Osbourne. That’s because he and his family were a part of mine. In the early 2000s, around when my dad started calling the TV the ‘idiot box,’ the early reality show The Osbournes was often on in our den. Watching that show was like peering into a portal into an alternate universe where dads had tattoos and daughters might decide to give themselves a pink mohawk on a Tuesday morning before school. Dinner guests might include Courtney Love or Marilyn Manson. The only rule in the Osbourne house was: No rules allowed.”
Suzy Weiss on The Free Press July 26, 2025 [but of course “No rules allowed” is a rule, if a feebly self-annihilating one].