“There is a vulnerability about waking in a dark room and rediscovering despair.”

Spiro T. Agnew Go Quietly... or Else

“I am not absent-minded. It is the presence of the mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”

G.K. Chesterton, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail March 27, 2001

“Theological distinctions are fine but not thin. In all the mess of modern thoughtlessness that still calls itself modern thought, there is perhaps nothing so stupendously stupid as the common saying, ‘Religion can never depend on minute disputes about doctrine.’ It is like saying that life can never depend on minute disputes about medicine. The man who is content to say, ‘We do not want theologians splitting hairs’ will doubtless be content to go on and say, ‘We do not want surgeons splitting filaments more delicate than hairs.’ It is the fact that many a man would be dead today, if his doctors had not debated fine shades about doctoring. It is also the fact that European civilization would be dead today, if its doctors of divinity had not debated fine shades about doctrine.”

G.K. Chesterton in “The Story of the Statues” in The Resurrection of Rome, quoted in “Chesterton’s Mail Bag” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #3 (Nov.-Dec. 2007)

“In plain words, imaginative poetry must not appeal to the sense of sound. The futurist poet is like the Early Victorian child. He must be seen and not heard.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News August 25, 1928 quoted in “The Book of the Prophet Daniel” in “GKC on Scripture * Conducted by Peter Floriani” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)

“As I have said elsewhere, there is a kinship between men who have lived in the dynamic periods of history, and Achilles or Ajax would have been perfectly at home at the Alamo or the battle of Adobe Walls, and Davey Crockett or Jim Bowie could have walked a quarter-deck beside Ulysses or Sir Francis Drake. All were men of action and of driving ambition and would have understood one another with no problem.”

Louis L’Amour Education of a Wandering Man

In my latest National Post column I heap scorn on the federal Liberals’ ability to stuff us all into standardized human-stacking units and on their desire to.

“Satire depends on sanity, and on contrast with insanity; that is why there is very little satire left.”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly July 16, 1927 quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)

“It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”

Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises