“I never in my life said anything merely because I thought it funny; though of course, I have had ordinary human vainglory, and may have thought it funny because I had said it. It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn’t.”

G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy

In the 1930s “Britain and France had come to prefer as leaders the rhetoricless businessman type. And while they had emasculated themselves, there appeared an evil lover to whom Europe all but succumbed before the mistake was seen and rectified. For while the world must move, evil rhetoric is of more force than no rhetoric at all… Britain was losing and could only lose until, reaching back in her traditional past, she found a voice [Churchill] which could match his accents with a truer grasp of the potentiality of things. Thus two men conspicuous for passion fought a contest for souls, which the nobler won. But the contest could have been lost by default.”

Richard Weaver The Ethics of Rhetoric

“Mithridate, haranguant contre les Romains, leur reproche surtout les formalités de leur justice.”

Montesquieu L’Esprit Des Lois Livre dix-neuvième

“The economic problem is not one of allocating resources efficiently when everything is known and constant, but of learning how to allocate and reallocate resources in an uncertain and changing world.”

D.T. Armentano Antitrust Policy: The Case for Repeal

“It is only when men become capable of displaying high-minded detachment and disregarding outward circumstance that we cannot help admiring their splendid and imposing qualities.”

Cicero

“no one can create beauty, be it a work of art or on a golfing links, unless he has both disciplined control and the ability to let go to the sudden glimmer.”

Michael Murphy Golf in the Kingdom

“It is a very different matter when a religion, in the real sense of a binding thing, binds men to their morality when it is not identical with their mood.”

G.K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion, quoted by David Beresford in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #5 March/April 2005

“If a man may not laugh at his own jokes, at whose jokes may he laugh? May not an architect pray in his own cathedral?”

Editor’s note in Gilbert! Vol. 4 #1 (September 2000)