Posts in Magna Carta
Words Worth Noting - August 15, 2021

“Is there a possibility that the government of nations may fall into the hands of men who teach the most disconsolate of all creeds, that men are but fireflies, and that this all is without a father?”

John Quincy Adams, in the Letters of Publicola, quoted in Russell Kirk The Conservative Mind [Kirk added that the specific target was Thomas Paine and that Adams went on that rather than such an outcome “Give us again the gods of the Greeks.”]

Words Worth Noting - July 4, 2021

“The [French] Revolution appealed to the idea of an abstract and eternal justice, beyond all local custom or convenience. If there are commands of God, then there must be rights of man. Here Burke made his brilliant diversion… the modern argument of scientific relativity; in short, the argument of evolution. He suggested that humanity was everywhere molded by or fitted to its environment and institutions; in fact, that each people practically got, not only the tyrant it deserved, but the tyrant it ought to have. ‘I know nothing of the rights of men,’ he said, ‘but I know something of the rights of Englishmen.’ There you have the essential atheist.”

G.K. Chesterton What’s Wrong with the World