“A boy plays at being a soldier or at being a brigand, but have you ever known a boy who played at being a lawyer? A child does not want self-government. A child wants to have a good time; and it is our business, who know how short but how creative is his time in Eden, to give him a good time. But you cannot have a good time if you have self-government. Personal self-government is a most horrible nuisance. Public self-government is worse.”

G.K. Chesterton “Childish Talk About Children” reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022) [yes it’s a lot of Chesterton this week; I can’t help it that he was so wise and so eloquent].

“Don’t ask why children need to see drag queens; Ask yourself why drag queens want an audience of children!”

Emailed by a friend July 30, 2022 as part of an email roundup, without attribution.

“Evil ideas are at the root of all this enormous evil which plagues the world at present.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 2, 1917, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)

In my latest Mercatornet article I say that what matters in the upcoming U.S. election is not what the people involved would have you focus on.

“Chesterton says in The Everlasting Man that murder and hatred of children are always associated with witchcraft, which comes from demons.”

Fred Berg in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)

“‘Those who can, do,’ but the converse, ‘those who do, can,’ is no less true, for we learn by doing.”

Anthony De Jasay The State (expressly regarding the possibility that we couldn’t spontaneously cooperate any more because we’ve lived under governments for so long).

“Way back in 1938 Walt Disney had some inspiring words about children’s entertainment: ‘everybody in the world was once a child. So in planning a new picture, we don’t think of grown-ups, and we don’t think of children, but just of that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us that maybe the world has made us forget and that maybe our pictures can help recall.’ Going on a hundred years later, the company which he founded seems to have forgotten about ‘that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us’.”

Editor Michael Cook’s note in email from Mercatornet April 1, 2022, teasing to a Kurt Mahlburg article.

On retiring he was planning to start reading and contemplating. But while the contemplative life is important “in what sense could one man’s contemplative life take on such grandiose proportions that it could be viewed as ‘for the good of human society’? Most of the ‘solitary contemplatives’ I know these days are pondering stuff a good bit removed from the ‘good of human society.’… It was at this critical log jam in my thinking that my wife earned her keep, signing me up at church for a ‘men’s group.’ I was initially skeptical, to say the least. Participation in such groups has always struck me as something akin to walking on red-hot coals. I have visions of guys dropping all their comfortable, manly gruff and gusto, squeamishly ‘sharing’ stories of personal picadilloes best kept to themselves, just before they completely unman themselves with a torrent of tears. But it didn’t turn out that way at all. This ‘men’s group’ was instead a first cousin to the bookish life – a Shakespeare reading group, where for three years now our little band of brothers has read from the Bard’s best every Sunday night, shouted hearty toasts over ale, and argued ad infinitum (in a very masculine manner), about the meaning of the very masculine life!”

Mark Johnson in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 3-4/22