“When the Puritans say they are democrats, they mean that they really have a universal desire to prevent ordinary people from doing ordinary things.”
G.K. Chesterton in English Life March 1924, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #3 (1/2/2022)
“There is, however, another good work that is done by detective stories. While it is the constant tendency of the Old Adam to rebel against so universal and automatic a thing as civilization, to preach departure and rebellion, the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions. By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates. When the detective in a police romance stands alone, and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves’ kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful knighterrancy. This form of art, like every form of art down to a comic song, has the whole truth of the universe behind it.”
G.K. Chesterton in “In Defence of Detective Stories” in The Defendant, quoted by Fr. Robert Wild in a piece on Catherine Doherty in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)
In my latest Loonie Politics column I note the ominous apparent paradox in which as the federal government spends and hires ever more recklessly, the national police force totally fails to attend to its core duty of protecting that government and its citizens from subversion, espionage and so on.
In my latest National Post column I describe the weird combination of tedium and fury induced by listening to members of the UN special committee for blaming Israel for all problems in the Mideast droning on.
In my latest National Post column I say the best way to get universities to stop promoting malevolent radicalism and start teaching again, and to promote actual social justice as well, is to privatize them and see what kind of education the young adults who will supposedly benefit from it are actually willing to pay full price for.
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the Supreme Court ruling on the former Bill C-69, aka Impact Assessment Act, is not a big win for those who don’t want the feds to crush our energy industry, and we need to engage on the science of climate change not count on sloppily-drafted legislation to save us from the zealots.
“it will be well to remember that when a rigid officialism breaks in upon the voluntary compromises of the home, that officialism itself will be only rigid in its action and will be exceedingly limp in its thought.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted without further source in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
“The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.”
“Thomas Jefferson (Summary View of the Rights of British America, August 1774)” quoted as The Federalist Patriot “Founder’s Quote Daily” for July 8, 2005 from Federalist.com