“Confucius was the greatest of all agnostics, and he did really make an agnostic civilisation; for ages it has been remarkable for its spirit of order; but not even a lunatic would say it was remarkable for its spirit of reform.”
G.K. Chesterton “Resurrection” in G.K.’s Weekly April 19, 1936 reprinted in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025)
“I think Canada’s politics has sunk into deep ruts. I think we need fresh and serious thinking about what kind of country we want to be.... For a decade our political parties, our Parliament, our public service and the other institutions of our democracy have been putting more and more energy into forgetting how to make decisions. Instead they’re all-in for message amplification.... There’s a forced, hollow certainty to too much of our political discourse that barely masks timidity and confusion behind.... We’re building cults of personality around people with unremarkable personalities.”
Paul Wells email/Substack April 10, 2025 [https://paulwells.substack.com/p/what-an-election-wont-fix]
“‘It is feeling and force of imagination that makes us eloquent,’ but ‘shout and bellow with uplifted hand, pant, wag your head, smite your hands together, slap your thigh, your breast, your forehead, and you will go straight to the heart of the dingier members of your audience.’”
Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria according to Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“If you wish to have little spare time, do nothing.”
Anton Chekov, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail May 13, 2003
“If the evil is to be absent, it shall be because we have routed it; not because we have fled from it.”
G.K. Chesterton in Reveille November, 1918, quoted in “Evil and Other Evils” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)
“IF AN AIRLINE PILOT CAN REMEMBER ALL THE BUTTONS… YOU TOO CAN USE THE TURN SIGNAL LEVER”
Graphic emailed by a friend without attribution
“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)
“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