“People forget how fast you did a job – but they remember how well you did it.”
Howard Newton quoted in Cliff Chadderton Excuse Us! Herr Schicklgruber
“The portrait of mankind as painted by the cynical evolutionist is a dreary one. Draped in a ragged costume of skin and bones, driven by primeval instincts and chemical imbalances, this poor excuse for an organism provides us with little cause for celebration. They litter the continents with war and with industrialization, pollute the atmosphere, and eternally suffer under the horrors of famine and bloodshed. Yet the eyes of G.K. Chesterton spy wonders even in the midst of chaos.”
Monica Larkin, “Essay Award Winner, Chesterton Academy of the Twin Cities” Class of 2024, in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)
“In this article, I draw upon critical feminist and intersectional frameworks to delineate an overarching orientation to structural oppression and unequal power relations that advantages White heteropatriarchal nuclear families (WHNFs) and marginalizes others as a function of family structure and relationship status. Specifically, I theorize that marriage fundamentalism, like structural racism, is a key structuring element of White heteropatriarchal supremacy. Marriage fundamentalism can be understood as an ideological and cultural phenomenon, where adherents espouse the superiority of the two-parent married family. But it is also a hidden or unacknowledged structural mechanism of White heteropatriarchal family supremacy that is essential to the reproduction and maintenance of family inequality in the United States. Through several examples, I demonstrate how – since colonization – marriage fundamentalism has been instantiated through laws, policies, and practices to unduly advantage WHNFs while simultaneously marginalizing Black, Indigenous, immigrant, mother-headed, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) families, among others. I conclude with a call for family scientists to further interrogate how marriage fundamentalism reproduces family inequality in American family life and to work toward its dismantling. A deeper understanding of how these complex and often covert mechanisms of structural oppression operate in family life is needed to disrupt these mechanisms and advance family equality and justice.”
Bethany Letiecq in the Journal of Marriage and Family, “an official journal of the National Council on Family Relations”, quoted by Mark Pilon in “News with Views” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024); Pilon adds “GKC, on the style: Long words go rattling by us like long railway trains. We know they are carrying thousands who are too tired or too indolent to walk and think for themselves. It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable. If you say ‘The social utility of the indeterminate sentence is recognized by all criminologists as a part of our sociological evolution towards a more humane and scientific view of punishment,’ you can go on talking like that for hours with hardly a movement of the gray matter inside your skull. But if you begin ‘I wish Jones to go to gaol and Brown to say when Jones shall come out,’ you will discover, with a thrill of horror, that you are obliged to think. The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word ‘damn’ than in the word ‘degeneration.’”
“Have you ever been traveling on a remote stretch of rural highway hundreds of miles from a big city, surrounded by farmland, when suddenly you pass a group of houses that look like they were magically transplanted from a city suburb? Have you ever wondered why every time you get off the interstate – any interstate – you see the same collection of chain restaurants, gas stations, and chain hotels? Most likely, you are encountering the ‘galactic city.’”
Study Smarter website [https://www.studysmarter.co.uk/explanations/human-geography/urban-geography/galactic-city-model/]
“It was not the slavers who would end up settling Africa, and subjugating it to foreign rule, but – by an irony familiar from Christian history – the emancipators.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“Politics are now so corrupt that everything they touch is corrupted. We are long past the point of protecting our government from the degrading influences of trade or professionalism. If anything, we have to protect our trades and professions from the degrading influences of government.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness November 5, 1920, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024) [and I need hardly add that we did not and it has therefore gotten far worse in the intervening century]
“The bungles, delays and disaster associated with space travel indicate that the people concerned with it may, indeed, be exercising creative incompetence. I emphasize ‘may’ because the test of real creative incompetence is that an observer cannot certainly tell whether the incompetence is deliberate or not.”
Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, The Peter Principle
“If you love your job, you will never work another day in your life.”
Implausibly attributed to Confucius in “More Choice Quotes” in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 #7 (May 2002) [evidently a version has also been attributed to Mark Twain, rather less unbelievably: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/646569-find-a-job-you-enjoy-doing-and-you-will-never