In my opening remarks to the 2024 Economic Education Association of Alberta “Freedom Talk” on “The Decline of Western Civilization: Our Fate or Our Choice?” in Red Deer, I said the fight to save Western civilization is fought first and foremost on the field of ideas.
“try easier” instead of trying to “throw the ball through a car wash and not get wet”
An announcer, I think Rance Mulliniks, during the Toronto Blue Jays-Boston Red Sox game Sept. 12, 2005 [approving of what the pitcher was doing, throwing a lot of breaking stuff then getting the batters to pop up on a high fastball]
In my closing remarks to the 2024 Economic Education Association of Alberta “Freedom Talk” conference in Red Deer on “The Decline of Western Civilization: Our Fate or Our Choice?” I urged people to go forth with joyful hope.
“The truth of religion comes from its symbolic rendering of man’s moral experience; it proceeds intuitively and imaginatively. Its falsehood comes from its attempt to substitute itself for science and to pretend that its poetic statements are information about reality.”
Eugene Genovese Roll Jordan Roll [before he became a Christian, obviously].
“THE DEBATE ABOUT NEW FORMS IN ART INTERESTS ME, because my reaction to it is not that of the ordinary reactionary. The first fact I feel is that all this faith in novelty is the very reverse of novel. It is also the very reverse of original. It has now been a convention for more than a century and a half; and it was originally borrowed from the stale and vulgar world of party politics. It is from the old wrangles of Rads and Reformers and True Blue Tories that modern art has borrowed this queer notion of incessant Progress and each generation crowing over the last. When I read all this confident exposition about new methods that must now supersede old methods; of how Yeats and Swinburne must yield to Mr. Eliot and Mr. Pound, just as Tennyson and Browning had to yield to Yeats and Swinburne, I heave a sigh that is full of old and tender memories. I do not feel as if I were reading some revolutionary proclamation of new anarchic hopes or ideals: I feel as if I were reading Macaulay’s Essays.”
G.K. Chesterton in “Novelty in Art” in Illustrated London News Oct. 6, 1928, reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)
“When the tide is receding from the beach it is easy to have the illusion that one can empty the ocean by removing water with a pail.”
Rene Dubos, quoted in Laurie Garrett, The Coming Plague: Newly Emergent Diseases in a World out of Balance
“It is one of the deep jokes of existence that very wise people and very ignorant people frequently say the same thing; perhaps it is the basis of democracy.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News Feb. 23, 1907, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)
“Rachel, you’re a long way from desperate.” “I may not be there but I’m on the bus.”
An exchange on a short-lived sitcom called “Flesh ‘n’ Blood” that I apparently watched on Oct. 11, 1991 for reasons I could not possibly now begin to explain.