“All things begin in the mind.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Story of the Statues,” in The Resurrection of Rome, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2008)
“To look to the future is merely to forge a testimonial from the babe unborn.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Nov. 3, 1917, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)
“This book appears as the world lumberingly and indecisively turns back from the abysses which we were lucky to escape, and which still yawn. Its theme is that the main responsibility for the century’s disasters lies not so much in the problems as in the solutions, not in impersonal forces but in human beings, thinking certain thoughts and as a result performing certain actions.”
Start of “Preface” in Robert Conquest Reflections on a Ravaged Century
“I believe most of the great social reforms of our time will remain in history as Follies.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 3, 1919, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“Imagine being so intellectually deficient that you convince yourself anyone with a different opinion is corrupt.”
Tony Heller on X Jan. 3 2024 [https://twitter.com/TonyClimate/status/1742668645933949269] somewhat ironically as for all his excellent work on the subject Heller himself insists multiple times a day that climate alarmism is a hoax, very often with the hashtag #ClimateScam
“... the whole way of life to which men are attached and the large ideas to which they own allegiance.”
Walt Rostow (in one of his books but my bibliographic note to self is incomprehensible)
In my latest Epoch Times column I argue that optimism is a psychological condition and generally fatuous, while hope is a theological virtue, in public affairs as in life more generally.
“I do not find myself often agreeing with the late Lord Keynes, but he has never said a truer thing than when he wrote, on a subject on which his own experience has singularly qualified him to speak, that ‘the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new ideas after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply are not likely to be the newest. But soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good and evil.’”
Friedrich Hayek “‘Free’ Enterprise and Competitive Order” in Individualism and Economic Order