“the world is not governed by the clever men, but by the active and energetic.”
Erasmus Darwin, Charles’ father, quoted by William Watson in Ottawa Citizen January 7, 2003
“Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose.”
C.S. Lewis, quoted as standalone “WORDS OF WISDOM” in Epoch Times email teaser on April 9, 2023 [Easter Sunday, appropriately].
“Distrust every poet who says to you, ‘I do not know where this came from.’ The proper answer is, ‘We none of us know where it comes from, but you have got to know where it is going to.’ You have got to have an image to be evoked before the end; and to work up to that from the beginning. In that sense, all good poetry is written backwards. That is exactly the difference between the inspired poet and the inspiring poet. The bad, or inspired, poet, lets the first lines dictate the last lines. The good, or inspiring, poet, lets the last lines dictate the first.”
G.K. Chesterton in New York American November 19, 1932, quoted in “Chesterton’s Mail Bag” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)
“‘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)