“It is impossible to caricature that which caricatures itself.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Dec. 16, 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)
“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)