“Up until New Year 1943 Goebbels and his minions had portrayed Nazi Germany as the harbinger of a New Order for Europe, a new social, political and economic system that would sweep away the decadent, failed and discredited wreckage of the Old Europe that had perished in the Great War of 1914-18. Nazism had been portrayed as youthful, vibrant, dynamic and irresistible. But now all that had changed. The 6th Army [trapped and collapsing at Stalingrad] was hailed as being a legion of heroes worthy of the finest traditions of the ancient Teutonic warriors. The spirit of Arminius, who had ousted the Romans from Germany, was invoked, along with that of Frederick the great, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, Blücher and many more. This was the reason behind the promotions and the awards. The 6th Army had to be built up to be the finest that Germany had ever fielded. In truth it was good, but it had never been as good as Goebbels now claimed. The message that Goebbels was slowly and carefully crafting was that the 6th Army was heroically sacrificing itself to save the ancient civilization of Europe from the onslaught of the barbaric Asiatic hordes pouring out of Siberia.”

Rupert Matthews Stalingrad: The Battle that Shattered Hitler’s Dream of World Domination

“The Red Army’s strength rests above all in the fact that it does not wage a predatory imperialistic war, but a patriotic war, a war of liberation, a just war. The Red Army's task is to liberate our Soviet territory from the German invaders, the residents of our towns and villages who, before the war, were free and lived like human beings and who are now oppressed and suffer pillage, subjection and famine – and lastly to liberate our women from the outrages to which they have been subjected by the Fascist fiends. The Red Army has to annihilate the German Fascist occupationists since they wish to enslave our Motherland, or when they are being surrounded refused to lay down their arms and surrender. The Red Army annihilates them because they seek to enslave our Motherland. The Red Army, like any army of any other people, is entitled to annihilate and bound to annihilate the enslavers of our Motherland.”

The end of a long windy speech by Stalin at a huge parade in Moscow on the 24th anniversary of the day the Red Army first went into battle (23 February 1918) quoted in Rupert Matthews Stalingrad: The Battle that Shattered Hitler’s Dream of World Domination [and absolutely characteristic of the rhetoric of totalitarians - one cannot imagine Churchill or Roosevelt talking in this way].

“Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.”

Someone called Arnold Bennett quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail May 7, 2004

“People are most often of two basic types – those who always have an excellent reason why they are not able to do something, and those who always get their tasks done, somehow.”

Martin Anderson Revolution

“Yet if this was the kind of talk that would see [the Marquis de] Sade spend his final years consigned to a lunatic asylum, the icy pitilessness of his gaze was not insanity. More clearly than many enthusiasts for enlightenment cared to recognize, he could see that the existence of human rights was no more provable than the existence of God.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World.

“It must have been Friday because the fish smell from the Mansion House coffee-shop next door was strong enough to build a garage on.”

Start of “Cinderella Suicide” (a John Dalmas story) in Raymond Chandler Killer in the Rain

“IN THE ENORMOUS BATTLE FOR THE HEARTS AND MINDS AND SOULS OF OUR CHILDREN, the modern education system has all the advantages of size, reach, funding, compulsion, and control. That system includes both public and private schools that operate alike and madly follow the latest fads and fashions and fallacies and offer less and less of the timeless truths. We can look around and see the devastating results everywhere: a populace with little literacy, no reasoning skills, no moral compass, no knowledge of the past, no appreciation for our cultural accomplishments, no common sense. They are glued to screens, awed by vapid celebrities, and stuck in dead-end jobs as wage slaves. They are wobbly and depressed, but also angry and inarticulate. They think in fragments, they talk in fragments. They are the product of our nation’s education system. But the thing about Goliath is that he is made to be toppled. The thing about David, who will defeat him, is that he sings songs unto the Lord.”

Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023) [including start].

“Mystery and reason: Christianity embraced them both. God, who had summoned light and darkness into being by the power of his voice, and separated the seas from the land, had ordained as well that the whole of his creation be a monument to harmony. ‘It is upon distinctions of number that the underlying principles of everything depend.’ So Abelard had written. A century on from his death, monuments to the cosmic order created by God, to its fusion of the miraculous and the geometric, were starting to rise above towns across Christendom. To enter Saint-Denis, where Abelard had first lived as a monk, was to behold an abbey utterly transformed. The rays of the sun, filtered through windows patterned with exquisitely coloured glass, illuminated the interior with an unprecedented light, radiant as, at the end of days, the descent of the new Jerusalem from heaven would be radiant, with the brilliance ‘like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as silver’. Yet if Saint-Denis, in the play of coloured rays across its interior, offered its visitors a glimpse of revelation, so also, in the soaring of its flying buttresses, in the elongation of its vaulted arches, did it proclaim its architect’s mastery of proportion and geometry. Dedicated in 1144, in the presence of the French king himself, the abbey had provided a model for a spectacular new style of cathedral. ‘The dull mind rises to the truth through material things.’ So it was written on the doors of Saint-Denis. The cathedrals built in the abbey’s wake provided a physical expression, on a scale never before attempted, of the distinctive order that had merged in the Latin West. Modernitas, its enthusiasts called it: the final age of time. They were spokesman for revolution: a revolution that had triumphed.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World