Posts in Family and Gender
Words Worth Noting - December 7, 2025

“Though he [Nero] came quite early in Roman Imperial history and was followed by many austere and noble emperors, yet for us the Roman Empire was never quite cleansed of that memory of the sexual madman. The populace or barbarians from whom we come could not forget the hour when they came to the highest place of the earth, saw the huge pedestal of the earthly omnipotence, read on it Divus Caesar, and looked up and saw a statue without a head.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted without further attribution 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) [in context of the North Hertfordshire Museum announcing that it would refer to Elagabalus as she-her].

Words Worth Noting - November 28, 2025

“My taste is for the sensational novel, the detective story, the story about death, robbery, and secret societies; a taste which I share in common with the bulk at least of the male population of this world.”

G.K. Chesterton “Novel-Reading” in T.P.’s Weekly April 7, 1911, reprinted in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)

Words Worth Noting - November 20, 2025

“of all the war books of the late twenties... Remarque’s [phenomenally successfull All Quiet on the Western Front] made its point, that his was a truly lost generation, most directly and emotionally, even stridently, and this directness and passionately at the heart of its popular appeal. But there was more. The ‘romantic agony” was a wild cry of revolt and despair – and a cry of acceleration. In perversion there could be pleasure. In darkness, light. The relation of Remarque and his generation to death and destruction is not as straightforward as it appears. In his personal life and in his reflections on the war Remarque seemed fascinated by death. All of his subsequent work exudes this fascination. As one critic put it later, Remarque ‘probably made more out of death than the most fashionable undertakers.’ Like the Dadaists, he was spellbound by war in its horror, by the act of destruction, to the point where death becomes not the antithesis of life but the ultimate expression of life, where death becomes a creative force, a source of art and vitality.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

Words Worth Noting - November 14, 2025

“Theoretically, I suppose, everyone would like to be freed from worries. But nobody in the world would always like to be freed from worrying occupations. … The truth is the other way. If we are not interested, why on earth should we be worried? Women are worried about housekeeping, but those that are most interested are the most worried. Women are still more worried about their husbands and their children. And I suppose if we strangled the children and poleaxed the husbands it would leave women free for higher culture. That is, it would leave them free to begin to worry about that. For women would worry about higher culture as much as they worry about everything else.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted without further attribution in Mark Pilon “News With Views” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)