“For an aristocracy is always progressive; it is a form of going the pace. Their parties grow later and later at night; for they are trying to live to-morrow.”
G.K. Chesterton What’s Wrong with the World
“Doing things and denouncing things are both quite easy, as compared with thinking about them.”
G.K. Chesterton, “On Keeping Your Hair On,” in Sidelights, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #5 (March 2006)
“in Nisga’a culture, we believe that this pole is alive with the spirit of our ancestors.”
An aboriginal chief regarding a totem pole repatriated from a Scottish museum, quoted in National Post August 29, 2023
“Carlotta was the kind of town where they spelled trouble t-r-u-b-i-l and if you tried to correct them they killed you.”
Rigby Reardon [played by Steve Martin] in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid
“Even the most obvious things can be doubted. The test of a truth is not whether I doubt it, or whether I am able to doubt it, but whether the reasons for thinking it is true are better than the reasons not to.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” May 8, 2023 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/things-i-had-to-learn]
“a simplistic great-fool theory of history.”
Peter H. Russell, Constitutional Odyssey: Can Canadians Be a Sovereign People? [re people blaming Mulroney’s ambition to outdo Pierre Trudeau for the Meech Lake debacle]
“The first thing worth noting is that the drafters of the Charter titled this first section ‘Guarantee of Rights and Freedoms.’ In other words, the intended purpose of the opening section is to underline that the rights and freedoms laid out in the Charter are guaranteed. But, if you look at almost every judgement that wrestles with this section, talk to almost any lawyer, or consult most government websites, they instead call the section ‘The Limitations Clause’ or ‘The Reasonable Limits Clause.’ That is a very different focus! And that betrays the problem: the legal culture in Canada has focused on the phrase ‘reasonable limits’ instead of ‘guarantees the rights and freedoms.’ That changes the analysis before we even start.”
André Schutten and Michael Wagner, A Christian Citizenship Guide 2nd edition
“‘the Bunch,’ a miscellaneous group of trivial and tawdry persons who were Tanis B. Judique’s friends...”
Mark Schorer’s Afterword to Sinclair Lewis Babbitt