“During the 19th century, and through much of the early 20th, Hamlet was regarded as Shakespeare’s central and most significant play, because it dramatized a central preoccupation of the age of Romanticism: the conflict of consciousness and action; the sense of consciousness as a withdrawal from action which could make for futility, and yet was all that could prevent action from becoming totally mindless.”
Northrop Frye Northrop Frye on Shakespeare
“There are no bad things, only bad uses of things.”
G.K. Chesterton “in his book on St. Thomas Aquinas” quoted by Gabriel Ahlquist in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023) [but in defence of AI which I suspect may test that rule severely]
“No good was ever done by one-sided controversy.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness August 2, 1918, quoted in “Chesterton For Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)
“We do not see in the past a perpetual line of increasing liberation or enlargement of artistic experiment. What we see in the past is the much more human business of men first doing something badly; then doing it well; then doing it too well – or, at least, too easily and too often. Then they commonly begin to do something else; but the thing is much more often an old thing than a new thing.”
G.K. Chesterton in “Novelty in Art” in Illustrated London News October 6, 1928, reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023) [critiquing “the rather antiquated theory of progress”.]
“the thousand-yard stare...”
C.S. Crawford, The Four Deuces: A Korean War Story
“An After School Satan Club plans to begin offering activities to children at a Tennessee elementary school following Christmas break, officials said. The Satanic Temple plans to host the club at Chimneyrock Elementary School in Cordova, news outlets reported.... A flyer about the club says the Satanic Temple is a non-theistic religion that views Satan ‘as a literary figure who represents a metaphorical construct of rejecting tyranny and championing the human mind and spirit.’ It says it does not attempt to convert children to any religious ideology, but offers activities that ‘emphasize a scientific, rationalistic, non-superstitious worldview.’”
Associated Press December 13, 2023
“The true modern cowardice is that no one has the courage to pronounce truisms. Consequently the chief evil of all modern argument is that it will not begin, like Euclid, with the things that are quite obvious; Euclid is dull during the first four or five pages; not before the third book does he begin to become even feebly brilliant. In short, the characteristic modern controversy has this defect, that those partaking in it have not the courage to be dull, have not the courage to state the things which are only evident to some.”
G.K. Chesterton in the Morning Post Oct. 18, 1906, quoted in “Chesterton For Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)
“Current fashion among history teachers affirms, in the teeth of the evidence, that individuals count for little; that history’s iron laws are all but unaffected by them.”
The Making of Tyrants by Alan Bullock, quoted in The Economist July 20, 1991