“Go back to the idea of government by ideas.”

G.K. Chesterton in “The Revolt Against Ideas,” in The Thing, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #6 (4-5/07)

“It’s hard to imagine how the human race could have survived if women had been as antisocial and unfriendly and unpleasant as men can be, and as the most creative men often are.”

Anthony Esolen in No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men, quoted in a review by Chuck Chalberg in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)

“With your usual rapid grasp of the inessentials, you regard the mushrooms as the most important element of Mr. Hillerman’s plan.”

A character in Jack Hitt, ed., The Perfect Murder

He had many dinners alone with General George Marshall during the war, after “two stiff, bourbon old-fashioneds which the Chief liked to mix himself. There would be talk of course, but absolutely no war talk. That day he probably had had to make decisions that affected the fate of nations; tomorrow he would face problems equally crucial. But that evening he would be calm and unworried as he listened to my chatting. Once, I asked him how he stood up under the strain; he answered: ‘I’ve had to train myself never to worry about a decision once it’s made. You worry before you make it, but not after. You make the best judgement you can about a problem – then forget it. If you don’t, your mind is not fit to make the next decision.’”

Frank Capra The Name Above the Title

“He [Harvard chaplain Peter J. Gomes] is surely right that extermination, conversion, and demoralizing relativism are not the only options. The best of options is a particular tradition with truth claims that exclude contradictory truth claims and include the truth claim that the dignity of the human person means that all human beings, no matter how erroneous their beliefs, are to be engaged with love and respect.”

Richard John Neuhaus in First Things December 2006 (#168)

“As the ostrich observed, Where is everybody?”

Anthony Boucher, The Case of the Seven Sneezes (1942), quoted in “Top Ten Detective Fiction Wise Cracks” compiled by “Gramps", in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 2 #6 Issue 15 (April-May 1999)

“But leadership is not just about getting the job done…. How many times have we read about a university athletic program that was excelling in athletics but was caught in a cheating scandal along the way? Or a financial institution that made its stockholders a lot of money but eventually collapsed because they violated the law? If as a leader you fail the institution you are leading, then you have failed – period. Once again, leadership is difficult, but not complicated. To do it right doesn’t require a sophisticated chart, a calculus formula, or a complex algorithm, but it does require some guidance.”

Author’s “Introduction” to William H. McRaven The Wisdom of the Bullfrog

“Kings needed help or counsel or money. They wanted assent to their policies and political support for them. These obvious facts should indeed receive due emphasis in any institutional history of the Middle Ages, but it is a delusion to suppose that, by merely calling attention to them, we are providing a sufficient explanation for the rise of medieval constitutionalism. The problem of maximizing assets to governmental policies arises for all rulers in all societies. It is not normally solved by the development of representative assemblies. Our argument is not that hard-headed medieval statesmen behaved in such-and-such a way because some theorist in a university had invented a theory saying that they ought to do so. The argument is rather that all men behave in certain ways in part at least because they adhere to certain ways of thinking. No doubt the ideas that are most influential in shaping actions are ones that the agent is hardly conscious of at all – he takes them so much for granted. But the historian has to make himself conscious of those ideas if he is to understand the men of a past age and the institutions that they created.”

Brian Tierney, “Medieval Canon Law and Western Constitutionalism,” in The Catholic Historical Review (Washington, April, 1966) excerpted in Bertie Wilkinson The Creation of Mediaeval Parliaments [and BTW Wilkinson was my grandfather].