“Weak if we were and foolish/ Not thus we failed, not thus;/ When that black Baal blocked the heavens/ He had no hymns from us.”
The introductory poem in G.K Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday, quoted in Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton
“The drivers ahead of us appear to be descended from monkeys who weren’t making it as monkeys.”
Me in traffic on the afternoon of December 17, 2024
“For admirers, the unusual challenge is to popularize a man who didn’t lie, steal or cheat on his wife. What do they say?”
Andrew Cohen about George Washington in Globe & Mail March 3, 1999
“Indeed, I think it [the turn to autocracy or worse because of the failings of democracy especially under “the Party System”] is part of the one big blunder that is at the back of all our blunders. It is hard to put it shortly, except by calling it the blunder of being Practical. Perhaps the nearest word is Opportunism; but it is not the sane opportunism that takes all opportunities to advance a great thing; it is the nervy and panicky opportunism that accepts all the small things because they have more opportunities. It is this yielding to the apparently practical that has ruined everything.”
G.K. Chesterton “The True Fascist Fallacy” reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)
“The secret to each fool, that he’s an ass”
“Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” in Alexander Pope Essay on Man and Other Poems [and yes, a precursor of the Dunning-Kruger effect]
“It taught me to be more sure of myself. The doughnut taught me to realize who I am.”
Ed Atwell, entrepreneur and inventor of the Sunnymoon doughnut, on the merits of entrepreneurship, quoted in Ottawa Citizen June 29, 2006
“God is not a path to fulfillment, He is fulfillment. C.S. Lewis, a devotee of Gilbert’s, was to say that if God was seen as a road, he was not seen at all.”
Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton [summing up the orthodox view in context of the young GKC’s struggles]
“I go slap through a roomful of MSS., criticizing deuced conscientiously, with the result that I post back some years of MSS. to addresses, which I should imagine, must be private asylums.”
G.K. Chesterton writing to E.C. Bentley (the Clerihew guy) in 1895 describing his workday and the various tasks he undertakes for a publishing house, Redway, including clearing a backlog of manuscripts, quoted in Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton