“I got off to a roaring stop”
Me on sitting down to work December 29, 2924 with an ambitious agenda of cleaning up fundamentals and being immediately overwhelmed by urgent trivia in yesterday’s leftover email.
“In the end, he [G.K. Chesterton] says, the exaggeration of sex becomes sexlessness. We are no longer drawn to the bait on the hook. We are drawn to the hook itself.”
Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)
“One of the great blows to stability has been the change in family life, from the first appearance of the teenager in the late 1930s, to Edmund Leach’s disturbing Reith lectures of 1967, which blamed the traditional family for most of society’s problems. There’s been a transformation in the way in which people arrange and furnish their houses, the sort of food they eat and where and how they eat it.”
Peter Hitchens The Abolition of Britain
“Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly”
Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria quoted in Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“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)