“If you particularly want it [a post] to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
“’There is no graded scale of essential worth,’ [Martin Luther King Jr.] King had written a year before his assassination. ‘Every human being has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the creator. Every man must be respected because God loves him.’ Every woman too, a feminist might have added. Yet King’s words, while certainly bearing witness to an instinctive strain of patriarchy within Christianity, bore witness as well to why, across the Western world, this was coming to seem a problem. That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely self-evident truth. A Roman would have laughed at it. To campaign against discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexuality, however, was to depend on large numbers of people sharing in a common assumption: that everyone possessed an inherent worth. The origins of this principle – as Nietzsche had so contemptuously pointed out – lay not in the French Revolution, nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in the Enlightenment, but in the Bible.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“It is absolutely useless and absurd to tell a man that he must not joke about sacred subjects. It is useless and absurd for a simple reason; because there are no subjects that are not sacred subjects.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News September 1, 1906, 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)
“The young react to their chaotic world in different ways. Some panic and run, rationalizing that the system is going to collapse anyway of its own rot and corruption and so they’re copping out, going hippie or yippie, taking drugs, trying communes, anything to escape. Others went for pointless sure-loser confrontations so that they could fortify their rationalization and say, ‘Well, we tried and did our part’ and then they copped out two. Others sick with guilt and not knowing where to turn or what to do went berserk. These were the Weather men and their like: they took the grand cop-out, suicide. To these I have nothing to say or give but pity – and in some cases contempt, for such as those who leave their dead comrades and take off for Algeria or other points.”
“Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals
“As my Dad used to say, ‘you don’t plant cabbages and pick roses.’”
Reform Party of Canada’s Victoria candidate, Christian Arla Taylor, on why Christians must not expect non-Christians to represent their views, quoted in British Columbia Report June 2, 1997
“Lest we forget an at least over-the-shoulder acknowledgement to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology lives off and leaves off and history begins – or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom – Lucifer.”
“Saul Alinksy” quoted as 3rd of 3 header quotations in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals [from the “so you admit it” file]
“I am a vegetarian between meals.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted without further attribution in “News with Views” “Compiled by Mark Pilon” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #2 (Nov./Dec. 2024)
“What the present generation wants is what all generations have always wanted – a meaning, a sense of what the world and life are – a chance to strive for some sort of order.”
“Prologue” in Saul Alinsky Rules for Radicals