“His jokes may be much worse in your opinion than they are in his opinion; but after all they must be jokes; they cannot be entirely shapeless mysteries, like many modern works of philosophy.”
G.K. Chesterton in “Sherlock Holmes” in A Handful of Authors, quoted in “Can’t You Take A Joke?” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
“No wise man will wish to bring more long words into the world.”
G.K. Chesterton “The War of the Gods and Demons” in The Everlasting Man quoted in “Everlasting” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)
“Across the Roman world, wailing at the sides of roads or on rubbish tips, babies abandoned by their parents were a common sight. Others might be dropped down drains, there to perish in the hundreds. The odd eccentric philosopher aside, few had ever queried this practice. Indeed, there were cities who by ancient law had made a positive virtue of it: condemning to death deformed infants for the good of the state. Sparta, one of the most celebrated cities in Greece, had been the epitome of this policy, and Aristotle himself had lent it the full weight of his prestige. Girls in particular were liable to be winnowed ruthlessly. Those who were rescued from the wayside would invariably be raised as slaves. Brothels were full of women who, as infants, had been abandoned by their parents – so much so that it had long provided novelists with a staple of their fiction. Only a few peoples – the odd German tribe and, inevitably, the Jews – had stood aloof from the exposure of unwanted children. Pretty much everyone else had always taken it for granted. Until, that was, the emergence of a Christian people. What the implications might be for infants tossed out with the trash was best demonstrated not by Basil, nor by Gregory, but by their sister. Macrina, the eldest of nine siblings, was in many ways the most influential of them all. She it was who had persuaded her brother to abandon the law and devote himself to Christ; similarly, she could be hailed by Gregory as the most brilliant of his instructors. Erudite, charismatic and formidably ascetic, she devoted herself to a renunciation of the world's pleasures so absolute as to fill her contemporaries with awe; and yet she did not abandon the world altogether. When famine held Cappadocia in its grip, and ‘flesh clung to the bones of the poor like cobwebs’, then Macrina would make a tour of the refuse tips. Those infant girls she rescued she would take home and raise as her own. Whether it was Macrina who had taught Gregory or Gregory Macrina, both believed that within even the most defenseless newborn child there might be glimpsed a touch of the divine.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“In the end Augustus, skeptic and realist, became convinced that moral reform awaited a religious renaissance. The agnostic generation of Lucretius, Catullus, and Caesar had run its course, and its children had discovered that the fear of the gods is the youth of wisdom. Even the cynical Ovid would soon write, Voltaireanly: expedit esse deos, et ut expedit esse putemus: ‘it is convenient that there should be gods, and that we should think they exist.’”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“One of the main things that Chesterton says about Charles Dickens, whose work he so greatly appreciates, is that he represents ‘the conjunction of common sense with uncommon sensibility.’ Now, because of Jane Austen we regard ‘sense’ and ‘sensibility’ as opposites, but Chesterton says they are actually the same. ‘They both mean receptiveness or approachability by the facts outside us.’ Still, there is a ‘popular distinction between sensibility and sense, particularly in the form called common sense. Common sense is a sensibility duly distributed in all normal directions; sensibility has come to mean a specialized sensibility in one.’”
Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)
“Toward the end of her life she [Dorothy Sayers] was to write, in the 1952 introduction to The Surprise, a forgotten play of Chesterton’s whose posthumous publication she instigated, ‘To the young people of my generation, G.K.C. was a kind of Christian liberator. Like a beneficent bomb, he blew out of the Church a quantity of stained glass of a very poor period, and let in the gusts of fresh air in which the dead leaves of doctrine danced with all the energy and indecorum of Our Lady’s Tumbler.’”
John Hissong in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
“I approach spirituality as a social scientist who believes that whether or not God exists, spirituality is a deep part of human nature, shaped by natural selection and cultural evolution, and central to human flourishing and self-transcendence.”
Jonathan Haidt on The Free Press November 25, 2025 [https://www.thefp.com/p/jonathan-haidt-the-devils-plan-to-ruin-next-generation]. A position unlikely to attract devotees let alone martyrs.
Re the end of apartheid then communism: “Communism, weighed in the scales of history, had been found wanting. To [F.W.] de Klerk, pious Calvinist that he was, all this had manifestly appeared the writing of God’s finger on the affairs of the world. This was not, however, how it tended to be seen by policymakers in America and Europe. They drew a different lesson. That the paradise on earth foretold by Marx had turned out instead to be closer to a hell only emphasized the degree to which the true fulfillment of progress was to be found elsewhere. With the rout of communism, it appeared to many in the victorious West that it was their own political and social order that constituted the ultimate, the unimprovable form of government. Secularism; liberal democracy; the concept of human rights: these were fit for the whole world to embrace. The inheritance of the Enlightenment was for everyone: a possession for all of mankind. It was promoted by the West, not because it was Western, but because it was universal. The entire world could enjoy its fruits. It was no more Christian than it was Hindu, or confusion, or Muslim. There was neither Asian nor European. Humanity was embarked as one upon a common road. The end of history had arrived.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World