“Let the common man bend more of his attention, more at least than he is doing at present, to the preservation of some permanent reason for living, some permanent thing worth fighting for. Let him take care of his philosophy, and his civilization will take care of itself.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News August 4, 2006, quoted in Dale Ahlquist and Peter Floriani Chesterton University Student Handbook
“What we require is the expansion of education, until it includes much older and wiser things.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Nov. 6, 1920, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)
“there is even a rather delightful publication for children called The Punctuation Repair Kit, which takes the line ‘Hey! It’s uncool to be stupid!’ – which is a lie, of course, but you have to admire them for trying.”
Lynn Truss Eats, Shoots & Leaves
“One mark of a good officer, he remembered, was the ability to make quick decisions. If they happened to be right, so much the better...”
Larry Niven Ringworld [according to my notes, which fail to explain why I ever read this thing, “he” was a character named Louis Wu]
“My dear friend, the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, was once accosted by a lady who complained that the synagogue service did not say what she meant. ‘Madam,’ said Heschel, ‘the idea is not that the service should say what we mean but that we should mean what the service says.’”
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus in response to a letter in First Things August-September 2004
“There are no stupid questions… but if there were…”
Another of mine, from Nov. 3 2014 [probably I was about to ask one that strove to qualify].
In my latest Mercatornet column I say the election of Donald Trump has certainly had a depressing effect on the giant climate gabfest in Baku but far more as symptom than as cause.
“But leadership, no matter whether you are a midshipman or an admiral, is never easy. Even those who seemed carry the burden of leadership with ease often struggle. Carl von Clausewitz, the great nineteenth-century general who wrote the consummate book On War, once said that ‘everything in war is simple, but the simple things are difficult.’”
Author’s “Introduction” to William H. McRaven The Wisdom of the Bullfrog