In my latest National Post column I say the new Japanese drive-thru get-it-over-with funerals underline the emptiness of modernity.
"This… is what is meant today by being broadminded: living on prejudices and never looking at them."
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News May 5, 1928, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 #6 p. 18.
"If a man wants to worship the Life Force merely because it is a Force, he may very naturally worship it in the electric battery. I am tempted to say it will serve him right if he eventually worships the life force in the electric chair."
G.K. Chesterton, quoted in Gilbert! Magazine Vol. 5 # 3 (Dec. 2001)
"All the will-worshippers, from Nietzsche to Mr. Davidson, are really quite empty of volition. They cannot will, they can hardly wish.... they always talk of will as something that expands and breaks out. But it is quite the opposite. Every act of will is an act of self-limitation.... In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else. That objection, which men of this school used to make to the act of marriage, is really an objection to every act.... Just as when you marry one woman you give up all the others, so when you take one course of action you give up all the other courses. If you become King of England, you give up the post of Beadle in Brompton. If you go to Rome, you sacrifice a rich suggestive life in Wimbledon. It is the existence of this negative or limiting side of will that makes most of the talk of the anarchic will-worshippers little better than nonsense. For instance, Mr. John Davidson tells us to have nothing to do with 'Thou shalt not'; but it is surely obvious that 'Thou shalt not' is only one of the necessary corollaries of 'I will.'"
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
"Modern conditions are treated as fixed, though the very word 'modern' implies that they are fugitive. Old Ideas are treated as impossible, though their very antiquity often proves their permanence."
G.K. Chesterton, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 No. 2 (Oct.-Nov. 2000)
In my latest National Post column I say the Canadian Prime Minister's inability to see the People's Republic of China clearly is not harmless naiveté.
In my latest National Post column I say the solution to mean-spirited echo chambers and fake news online is in the mirror.
In my latest National Post column I say the mass shooting at a Texas church does not validate arguments for gun control.