“Before you believe what the press says, find out who pays for the ink.”

Emailed by a friend without attribution

“Her [Rome’s] language became, by a most admirable corruption, the speech of Italy, Rumania, France, Spain, Portugal, and Latin America; half the white man’s world speaks a Latin tongue. Latin was, till the 18th century, the Esperanto of science, scholarship, and philosophy in the West; it gave a convenient international terminology to botany and zoology; it survives in the sonorous ritual and official documents of the Roman Church; it still writes medical prescriptions, and haunts the phraseology of the law. It entered by direct appropriation, and again through the romance languages (regalis, regal, royal; paganus, pagan, peasant), to enhance the wealth and flexibility of English speech. Our Roman heritage works in our lives a thousand times a day.”

Will Durant Caesar and Christ

“We have not any need to rebel against antiquity; we have to rebel against novelty.”

G.K. Chesterton “The Eternal Revolution” in Orthodoxy quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)

“A fool and his money are soon partying.”

“Tagline from the Internet” quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #5 (March 2000)

“One of the ancient Greek philosophers is credited with the statement: ‘Anything worth doing is worth doing well.’”

James Buchanan What Should Economists Do? but beware the attribution because my notes also contain “‘Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well.’ - Earl of Chesterfield, 1746” [D.P. Diffiné, “The 1993 American Incentive System Almanac”] and “it was said of Nicholas Poussin, the painter, that the rule of his conduct was, that ‘whatever was worth doing at all was worth doing well;’” [Samuel Smiles Self-Help]

“Finally, there is the great passage in ‘The Ethics of Elfland’ where Chesterton suggests that the sun may rise in response to God saying ‘Do it again,’ each day. One of our Chesterton Academy students responded to this passage in her senior capstone essay by saying, ‘This claim is supported by the fact that the sun refused to shine on the day men killed God.’”

Joshua Russell, “Headmaster at Chesterton Academy of the Sacred Heart in Peoria, Illinois” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)

“A joke can be so big that it breaks the roof of the stars.”

G.K. Chesterton in “The Dickens Period” in Charles Dickens, quoted in “Can’t You Take A Joke?” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

“The period during which light was ‘sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle’ was a period of crisis – a period when something was wrong – and it ended only with the development of wave mechanics and the realization that light was a self-consistent entity different from both waves and particles. In the sciences, therefore, if perceptual switches accompany paradigm changes, we may not expect scientists to attest to these changes directly. Looking at the moon, the convert to Copernicanism does not say, ‘I used to see a planet, but now I see a satellite.’ That locution would imply a sense in which the Ptolemaic system had once been correct. Instead, a convert to the new astronomy says, ‘I once took the moon to be (or saw the moon as) a planet, but I was mistaken.’ That sort of statement does recur in the aftermath of scientific revolutions.”

Thomas S. Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: 50th Anniversary Edition