“IF AN AIRLINE PILOT CAN REMEMBER ALL THE BUTTONS… YOU TOO CAN USE THE TURN SIGNAL LEVER”
Graphic emailed by a friend without attribution
“My taste is for the sensational novel, the detective story, the story about death, robbery, and secret societies; a taste which I share in common with the bulk at least of the male population of this world.”
G.K. Chesterton “Novel-Reading” in T.P.’s Weekly April 7, 1911, reprinted in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)
“The fascist opposition to the novel [All Quiet on the Western Front] blended often with that of the conservatives and presented many of the same arguments, but there was an essential difference in the reasoning. The fascists sanctified not so much the purpose of the war as the ‘experience’ of the war, the very essence of the war, its immediacy, its tragedy, its exhilaration, its ultimate ineffability in anything but mystical and spiritual terms. The war, as we shall see, gave meaning to fascism. Thus, any suggestion that the war had been purposeless was a slur against the very existence of this form of extremism. It is here, on the extreme right, that the most active opposition to Remarque, and to the whole wave of so-called negative war books, films, and other artifacts, assembled.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“Normal people generally take normal things for granted; even when they are no longer there.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly March 19, 1932, as header quotation on Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
“Erasure is as important as writing”
Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria according to Will Durant Caesar and Christ [with more on how to get rid of the junk]
“BY his very success in inventing labour-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.”
“Lewis Mumford in The Conduct of Life (1951)” – as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail Feb. 21, 2002
“The terrible danger in the heart of our Society is that the tests are giving way. We are altering, not the evils, but the standards of good by which alone evils can be detected and defined.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News March 25, 1911, quoted in “Evil and Other Evils” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)
“Nobody told me that when you get a husband, the ears are sold separately.”
Graphic emailed by a friend without attribution