“‘Read biography,’ said Disraeli, ‘for that is life without theory.’”
John O’Sullivan in National Review December 8, 1997
“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)
“hate is always the result of a feeling of impotence.”
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in National Review January 22, 1990
“The world is run by those who show up.”
Bruce Vincent (a friend of his) quoted by William Perry Pendley, President and CEO of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, in a speech January 21, 1993 in Vancouver
“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)
“I began listening more carefully to what my father had to say after the Churchill speech, for my father was clear in his own mind about where his loyalties lay. Having known persecution in Poland [he was Jewish], having served with his brothers in the British Army during the First World War, and having been a fierce patriot in his land of adoption, my father was an outspoken advocate of British freedom. ‘This is the one place where people are still free,’ he would tell me. ‘If you have to choose between giving in and fighting, fight; just remember that. Fight with everything you’ve got.’”
Jack Maurice Nissen Winning the Radar War
“in order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuisance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential…. A man has control over many things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much hero that there would be no novel. And the reason why the lives of the rich are at bottom so tame and uneventful is simply that they can choose the events…. It is vain for the supercilious moderns to talk of being in uncongenial surroundings. To be in a romance is to be in uncongenial surroundings…. the moderns, who imagine that romance would exist most perfectly in a complete state of what they call liberty…. They say they wish to be, as strong as the universe, but they really wish the whole universe as weak as themselves.”
G.K. Chesterton Heretics
“We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God’s world. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God’s children. And that we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.”
Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech, in Memphis, Tenn., April 3, 1968 [the day before he was assassinated] quoted by Jamil Jivani in National Post January 17, 2023