“It seems to me this pleasure-mad generation has lost the art of enjoyment.”
G.K. Chesterton in Gloucestershire Echo, Oct. 26, 1925, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)
“In the end, he [G.K. Chesterton] says, the exaggeration of sex becomes sexlessness. We are no longer drawn to the bait on the hook. We are drawn to the hook itself.”
Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)
“One of the great blows to stability has been the change in family life, from the first appearance of the teenager in the late 1930s, to Edmund Leach’s disturbing Reith lectures of 1967, which blamed the traditional family for most of society’s problems. There’s been a transformation in the way in which people arrange and furnish their houses, the sort of food they eat and where and how they eat it.”
Peter Hitchens The Abolition of Britain
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say all the excitement about Zohran Mamdani is misplaced, not because he isn’t potentially important but because what matters isn’t whether he wins a primary or even the New York general mayoral election. It’s what happens if and when he tries to govern and what the result tells us about the soundness or insanity of his principles.
“For admirers, the unusual challenge is to popularize a man who didn’t lie, steal or cheat on his wife. What do they say?”
Andrew Cohen about George Washington in Globe & Mail March 3, 1999
“That the issue of sexual morality should become a vehicle of rebellion against bourgeois values for the modern movement was inevitable. In the art of Gustav Klimt, in the early operas of Richard Strauss, in the plays of Frank Wedekind, in the personal antics of Verlaine, Tchaikovsky, and Wilde, and even in the relaxed morality of the German youth movement, a motif of eroticism dominated the search for newness and change. In the United States Max Eastman shouted, ‘Lust is sacred!’ The sexual rebel, particularly the homosexual, became a central figure in the imagery of revolt, especially after the ignominious treatment Oscar Wilde received at the hands of the establishment. Of her Bloomsbury circle of gentle rebels Virginia Woolf said, ‘the word bugger was never far from our lips.’ Andre Gide, after a long struggle with himself, denounced publicly le mensonge des moeurs, the moral life, and admitted his own predilections. Passion and love, he had concluded, were mutually exclusive. And passion was much purer than love. Diaghilev’s sexual proclivities were well known, and he made no attempt to mask them; quite the reverse. Stravinsky said later that Diaghilev’s entourage was ‘a kind of homosexual Swiss Guard.’”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era [so the modern rebellion over the issue of sexual morality is actually stale and reactionary]
“inevitably, to attempt the tracing of Christianity’s impact on the world is to cover the rise and fall of empires, the actions of bishops and kings, the arguments of theologians, the course of revolutions, the planting of crosses around the world. It is, in particular, to focus on the doings of men. Yet that hardly tells the whole story. I have written much in this book about churches, and monasteries, and universities; but these were never where the mass of the Christian people were most influentially shaped. It was always in the home that children were likeliest to absorb the revolutionary teachings that, over the course of two thousand years, have come to be so taken for granted as almost to seem human nature. The Christian revolution was wrought above all at the knees of women.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [in context of his own saintly though herself childless godmother, a teacher]
“Idolizing a politician is like believing the stripper really likes you.”
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