“My taste is for the sensational novel, the detective story, the story about death, robbery, and secret societies; a taste which I share in common with the bulk at least of the male population of this world.”
G.K. Chesterton “Novel-Reading” in T.P.’s Weekly April 7, 1911, reprinted in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)
“The fascist opposition to the novel [All Quiet on the Western Front] blended often with that of the conservatives and presented many of the same arguments, but there was an essential difference in the reasoning. The fascists sanctified not so much the purpose of the war as the ‘experience’ of the war, the very essence of the war, its immediacy, its tragedy, its exhilaration, its ultimate ineffability in anything but mystical and spiritual terms. The war, as we shall see, gave meaning to fascism. Thus, any suggestion that the war had been purposeless was a slur against the very existence of this form of extremism. It is here, on the extreme right, that the most active opposition to Remarque, and to the whole wave of so-called negative war books, films, and other artifacts, assembled.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“Normal people generally take normal things for granted; even when they are no longer there.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly March 19, 1932, as header quotation on Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
“The terrible danger in the heart of our Society is that the tests are giving way. We are altering, not the evils, but the standards of good by which alone evils can be detected and defined.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News March 25, 1911, quoted in “Evil and Other Evils” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)
“To hear some critics talk now you would think there are only two kinds of writers in the world – popular writers who are bad, and unpopular writers who are good.”
G.K. Chesterton in The Observer Feb. 26, 1911, quoted in “The Writer’s Work” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)
“of all the war books of the late twenties... Remarque’s [phenomenally successfull All Quiet on the Western Front] made its point, that his was a truly lost generation, most directly and emotionally, even stridently, and this directness and passionately at the heart of its popular appeal. But there was more. The ‘romantic agony” was a wild cry of revolt and despair – and a cry of acceleration. In perversion there could be pleasure. In darkness, light. The relation of Remarque and his generation to death and destruction is not as straightforward as it appears. In his personal life and in his reflections on the war Remarque seemed fascinated by death. All of his subsequent work exudes this fascination. As one critic put it later, Remarque ‘probably made more out of death than the most fashionable undertakers.’ Like the Dadaists, he was spellbound by war in its horror, by the act of destruction, to the point where death becomes not the antithesis of life but the ultimate expression of life, where death becomes a creative force, a source of art and vitality.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“We cannot be content with the vague modern phrase that every sentiment must be tolerated so long as it is sincere. Sincerity is a palliation of partly evil things: but it is an aggravation of entirely evil things. That a man is a sincere Mormon makes him better; but that he is a sincere Satanist makes him worse. There are theories so vile, there are beliefs so abominable that one can only endure their existence by denying their sincerity. Sincerity in these cases has no moral value. It amounts to no more than saying that a cannibal sincerely enjoys boiled missionary, or that Mrs. Brownrigg sincerely tried to hurt her apprentices. Those who talk of ‘tolerating all opinions’ are very provincial bigots who are only familiar with one opinion. There are opinions which are in the literal and legal sense intolerable. Otherwise we are saying that two blacks make a white; that one who has acted wickedly is excused if he has thought wickedly too.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted by Mark Pilon in “News With Views” (without further attribution) in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
“Work is the rent you pay for the room you occupy on Earth”
One of the late Queen Mother’s sayings, much quoted in the royal family, according to the Ottawa Citizen July 1, 1999