“The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.”
Richard John Neuhaus in First Things March 2000
In my latest National Post column, I write to Santa listing things I could really do without this year… and they all come from the government.
“Liberty is traditional and conservative; it remembers its legends and its heroes. But tyranny is always young and seemingly innocent, and asks us to forget the past.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News December 30, 1911, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)
In my latest Epoch Times column I parse modern efforts to hide what we celebrate on Dec. 25 behind “Season” and “Winter” greetings, lights and other obvious clues.
“We never let a quarrel interrupt a good argument.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted as header quotation by Chris Chan in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)
“Fifteen minutes a day devoted to self-improvement, will be felt at the end of the year.”
Samuel Smiles Self-Help
“trying to say (at the same time) that God does not exist, and that He ought to be ashamed of existing, or possibly that he ought to be ashamed of not existing; an artistic effect that depends on belief. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The End of the Moderns,” in The Common Man and “Introductory Remarks,” in Heretics in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #1 (Sept. 2002)
“Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.”
James Baldwin, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go