“The fascist opposition to the novel [All Quiet on the Western Front] blended often with that of the conservatives and presented many of the same arguments, but there was an essential difference in the reasoning. The fascists sanctified not so much the purpose of the war as the ‘experience’ of the war, the very essence of the war, its immediacy, its tragedy, its exhilaration, its ultimate ineffability in anything but mystical and spiritual terms. The war, as we shall see, gave meaning to fascism. Thus, any suggestion that the war had been purposeless was a slur against the very existence of this form of extremism. It is here, on the extreme right, that the most active opposition to Remarque, and to the whole wave of so-called negative war books, films, and other artifacts, assembled.”

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

“Normal people generally take normal things for granted; even when they are no longer there.”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly March 19, 1932, as header quotation on Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

“Erasure is as important as writing”

Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria according to Will Durant Caesar and Christ [with more on how to get rid of the junk]

“BY his very success in inventing labour-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.”

“Lewis Mumford in The Conduct of Life (1951)” – as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail Feb. 21, 2002

“The terrible danger in the heart of our Society is that the tests are giving way. We are altering, not the evils, but the standards of good by which alone evils can be detected and defined.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News March 25, 1911, quoted in “Evil and Other Evils” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)

“Nobody told me that when you get a husband, the ears are sold separately.”

Graphic emailed by a friend without attribution

“To hear some critics talk now you would think there are only two kinds of writers in the world – popular writers who are bad, and unpopular writers who are good.”

G.K. Chesterton in The Observer Feb. 26, 1911, quoted in “The Writer’s Work” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)

“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