“The whole book, indeed, is a picture of the Tree of Life – a sappy and golden book, full of buoyancy and confidence. We cannot, I admit, appropriate all its confidence today. We cannot point to the high virtue of Christian living and the gay, almost mocking courage of Christian martyrdom, as a proof of our doctrines with quite that assurance with Athanasius takes as a matter of course. But whoever may be to blame for that, it is not Athanasius.”

C.S. Lewis’s 1944 “Preface from the First Edition” in John Behr’s translation of Saint Athanasius On the Incarnation

“At a repast given in 63 [AD - he’s describing the increasingly high living as the Roman Republic fell apart] by a high priest, and attended incongruously by Vestal Virgins and Caesar, the hors d’oeuvres consisted of mussels, spondyles, fieldfares with asparagus, fattened fowls, oyster pastries, sea nettles, ribs of roe, purple shellfish, and songbirds. Then came the dinner – sows’ udders, boars head, fish, duck, teals, hares, fowl, pastries, and sweets.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ [and I was going along salivating pretty happily until we got to the udders]

“‘Realistic’ books are generally written from one or both of two very vile motives; the more pardonable is an ugly itch to excite our appetites, the much less pardonable is an ugly itch to depress our spirits.”

G.K. Chesterton in Daily News April 27, 1912, quoted in “The Ugly” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)

“That history bore witness to a war between light and darkness, aeons old, and demanding from those on the side of good an unstinting watchfulness against evil, was a conviction that Tolkien shared with the Nazis. Admittedly, when articulating the mission of National Socialism, its leaders tended not to frame it in such terms. They preferred the language of Darwinism. ‘A cool doctrine of reality based on the most incisive scientific knowledge and its theoretical elucidation.’ So Hitler had defined National Socialism, a year before invading Poland and engulfing Europe in a second terrible civil war.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World

“This growth of arbitrary government in our country is a very real thing. The power of the Censor is a strong example of it, but not necessarily even the strongest. Judicial equity has become more and more a question of the judge and less and less a question of the statute. The very phrase ‘judge-made law’ either means nothing or it means personal despotism. If anyone said ‘King-made law’ we should start. The very importance of the legal mind is an instance; for lawyers necessarily thrive upon the absence of law.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted, without further attribution, in “News with Views” (“compiled by Mark Pilon”) in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)

“I have noticed that, with few exceptions, men bungle their affairs. Everywhere I see incompetence rampant, incompetence triumphant.”

Raymond Hull’s introduction to Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, The Peter Principle

“It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”

Jerome K. Jerome Three Men in a Boat

“The follower of Rousseau tended too much to say: ‘I am born in a state of innocence, and therefore I can be as guilty as I like.’ But the new skeptics, who also deny Original Sin, seem rather to be saying: ‘There is no Original Sin, because everybody can be born bad and behaves as badly as possible without it.’ The modern humanitarian believes in Total Depravity without any Fall to explain it.”

G.K. Chesterton in New York American March 25, 1933, quoted in “The Bad” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)