“What is the matter with internationalism is that it is imperialism. It is the imposition of one ideal of one sect on the vital varieties of men. But it is worse than the imposition of ideals. It is actually the imposition of indifference.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 17, 1922, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)
“the time-honored axiom that if something is not worth doing, it is not worth doing right.”
Dave Barry Dave Barry’s Bad Habits
“Blessed is he who has found his work. Let him ask no other blessedness.”
Thomas Carlyle, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience [and doubtless many others; those are just the two in my files].
“I care not what may be the form of belief which the on-looker may hold – whether it be in unison or in antagonism with that faith preached by these men; but he is only a poor semblance of a man who can behold such a sight through the narrow glass of sectarian feeling, holding opinions foreign to his own.”
W.F. Butler The Great Lone Land [re the extraordinary devotion of the French (and thus by implication Catholic) missionaries to the western Indian tribes]
“Time is not the same for the speaker as for the audience. To the speaker it is too, too brief for what he has to say. For the audience it is a grim foretaste of eternity.”
Marshall McLuhan “‘Culture Without Literacy’/ Explorations 1, 1953”, quoted as X post from The McLuhan Institute March 11, 2025 [https://x.com/McLinstitute/status/1899494456417480991]
“‘ALL ART is propaganda’, wrote George Orwell in 1940, ‘but not all propaganda is art.’”
Start of “Six books you didn’t know were propaganda/ Governments influence a surprising amount of literature. Some of it pretty good” in The Economist Nov. 3, 2023 [https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2023/11/03/six-books-you-didnt-know-were-propaganda with no byline]
“History belongs to an age of rationalism, to the 18th and particularly the nineteenth century. The latter century had shown great respect for its historians. The Guizots, Michelets, Rankes, Macaulays, and Actons were read and appreciated, especially by a bourgeoisie bent on expansion and integration. Our century has, by contrast, been an antihistorical age, in part because historians have failed to adapt to the sentiments of their century but even more so because this century has been one of dis-integration rather than integration. The psychologist has, as a result, been more in demand than the historian. And the artist has received more respect than either. It is noteworthy that among the mountains of writing built up on the subject of the Great War, a good many of the more satisfying attempts to deal with its meaning have come from the pens of poets, novelists, and even literary critics, and the professional historians have produced, by and large, specialized and limited accounts, most of which pale in evocative and explanatory power before those of the littérateurs. Historians have failed to find explanations to the war that correspond to the horrendous realities, to the actual experience of the war. The spate of official and unofficial histories that issued forth in the twenties was largely ignored by the public. By contrast, Remarque’s All Quiet [on the Western Front] became, virtually overnight, the best seller of all previous time.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“A million kids want to clean up the earth. A million parents want them to start with their rooms.”
Emailed by a friend without attribution