“To have no philosophy is to have a bad philosophy.”
Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis [quoting a letter around Christmas 1928 to his brother Warren (“Warnie”) in China in which Lewis insisted that the line was original with him].
“The universal mark of ‘social reforms’ is the general attempt of the wealthy to get the needy well under their control.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Jan. 25, 1913, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)
In my latest Epoch Times column I say that an ideology, aka paradigm or worldview, is essential to coherent thought. So instead of the “I know you are but what am I?” spectacle of people trading cries of “ideologue” we should try to debate the reasons why we disagree about which evidence matters and what it says. And your goal should not be to avoid ideologies but to choose a sensible one.
“If you think wrong, you go wrong.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News September 12, 1914, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2008)
“the waters are always smoothest and even most polished when they pour over the precipice.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted by Dale Ahlquist in “Chesterton University” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022) [with particular reference to those topics on which polite society and the Establishment stifle debate]
“Al Gore prefers to say, ‘Well, in my faith tradition...’ As a rule, folks with a faith tradition tend not to call it such. At Friday prayers in Mecca, the A-list imams don’t say, ‘Well, in my faith tradition we believe in killing all the infidels.’”
Mark Steyn's “Happy Warrior” column in National Review Dec. 13, 2004
“When the art of controversy comes back, it will not come from the world of sceptics and iconoclasts. It will come rather from the world of believers and of dogmatists. It will not be the work of men who merely ask questions, but of men who believe that they have found answers. It will come out of the clash of real convictions, which are positive and not negative; not from those who say: ‘What is truth,’ but from those who can still say: ‘This is truth’; not from Pilate but from Paul.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness Sept. 8, 1922, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
In my latest National Post column I say the DND report on patriarchy invading the cosmos , while hilarious, reflects an pernicious ideology that destroys all productive enterprises from space exploration to defence procurement, and has wrecked governance in Canada.