“Theoretically, I suppose, everyone would like to be freed from worries. But nobody in the world would always like to be freed from worrying occupations. … The truth is the other way. If we are not interested, why on earth should we be worried? Women are worried about housekeeping, but those that are most interested are the most worried. Women are still more worried about their husbands and their children. And I suppose if we strangled the children and poleaxed the husbands it would leave women free for higher culture. That is, it would leave them free to begin to worry about that. For women would worry about higher culture as much as they worry about everything else.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted without further attribution in Mark Pilon “News With Views” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)

“There is no more remarkable psychological element in history than the way in which a period can suddenly become unintelligible... To the early Victorian period we have in a moment lost the key: the Crystal Palace is the temple of a forgotten creed. The thing always happens sharply...”

G.K. Chesterton’s 1904 biography of G.F. Watts, quoted in Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton

“Democracy as a failure is better than Dictatorship as a success.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted without further attribution by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)

“The scenes uncovered by the allied armies in 1945 were not the inevitable outgrowth of the events that took place in early 1933, but they were a probable outcome. National Socialism was yet another offspring of the hybrid that has been the modernist impulse: irrationalism crossed with technicism. Nazism was not just a political movement; it was a cultural eruption. It was not imposed by a few; it developed among many. National Socialism was the apotheosis of a secular idealism that, propelled by a dire sense of existential crisis, lost all trace of humility and modesty – indeed, of reality. Borders and limits became meaningless. In the end this idealism completed a circle, turned upon itself, and became anthropophagous. What began as idealism ended as nihilism. What began as celebration ended as scourge. What began as life ended as death. Contrary to many interpretations of Nazism, which tend to view it as a reactionary movement, as, in the words of Thomas Mann, an ‘explosion of antiquarianism,’ intent on turning Germany into a pastoral folk community of thatched cottages and happy peasants, the general thrust of the movement, despite archaisms, was futuristic. Nazism was a headlong plunge into the future, toward a ‘brave new world.’ Of course it used to full advantage residual conservative and utopian longings, paid its respects to those these romantic visions, and picked its ideological trappings from the German past, but its goals were, by its own lights, distinctly progressive.”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“We have to realize that the child’s world is without economic purpose. A child doesn’t understand – happy ignorance – that people are paid to do things. To a child the policeman rules the street for self-important majesty; the furnace man stokes the furnace because he loves the noise of falling coal and the fun of getting dirty; the grocer is held to his counter by the lure of aromatic spices and the joy of giving. And in this very ignorance there is a grain of truth. The child’s economic world may be the one that we are reaching out in vain to find. Here is a path in the wood of economics that some day might be followed to new discovery. Meantime, the children know it well and gather beside it their flowers of beautiful illusion.”

“War-Time Santa Claus” in Stephen Leacock On the Front Line of Life

“The Church does not say that all heretics are lost, for it does say that there is a common conscience by which they may be saved. But it does definitely say that he who knows the whole truth sins in accepting half the truth.”

G.K. Chesterton in “Roman Catholicism” in An Outline of Christianity, quoted in “Another Look at the Catholic Idea” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)

“‘The storm has died away,’ said Paul Valéry in a lecture at Zurich in 1922, ‘and still we are restless, and uneasy, as if the storm were about to break. Almost all the affairs of men remain in a terrible uncertainty.’ He spoke about all the things that had been injured by the war: economic relations, international affairs, and individual lives. ‘But among all these injured things,’ he stated, ‘is the mind. The mind has indeed been cruelly wounded... it doubts itself profoundly.’”

Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era

“I trust it is consistent with my respect both for the talents and the sex of a lady critic who rebuked me in these columns, if I say that her argument is feminine in more ways than one. I mean that she really justified female policemen on the ground that they are not policemen. It is right to add that she does more definitely justify female policemen on the ground that they are females; that they do bring into the police system some of those real superiorities of the female standpoint, about which most civilized men are agreed. Her argument is not that women are fitted to be official, but rather that they are likely to be unofficial. In this argument there is something superficially sympathetic for all of us; but I regard it as none the less dangerous in its deepest effects…. I do not allege that my critic alleges that the lady policemen would arrest anyone she disliked. But I do allege that her argument leads in that direction; that the very atmosphere, of optimistic good nature and opportunist good intention, may involve rather an extension than a limitation of powers in their very nature painful and coercive…. it is as plain as a pike-staff that a free nation is ruled by laws, and a free family cannot be ruled by laws. You cannot draw up a constitution for Mr. and Mrs. Brown and the baby; you cannot enact that the baby shall have a vote, or define exactly when the mother shall have a veto. The Brown Constitution, much more than the British Constitution, must be an unwritten law. But if women mean to extend this domestic rule of thumb to the universal rule of society, it is clear that what is only tact in one place will become treason in the other. And this is the danger that I perceive in the very defense offered for the feminine policeman. The defence substantially suggests that the policewoman will still be a woman; and I am afraid she will. She will have all the vigorous female virtues turned into female vices, by being applied to legal and communal things to which they are not applicable…. In truth the defenders of these official changes misunderstand our objection to them; and industriously make their case worse, when they imagine they are making it better. They try to convince us that the manner of the new official will have the amiability of the amateur and not the strictness of the official. They do not see that, in one who still has the power of the official, the amiability of the amateur is merely the caprice of the sultan. We should prefer a legality that kept within its rights to a laxity that was always invading our rights. Thus my critic says that after all the policeman vanishes, and turns into a mother talking to boys. But I do not like these conjuring tricks happening to a policeman except in a pantomime. I would rather be taken up by a policeman, or even a policewoman, than by a total stranger masquerading as my mother. After all the policewoman has the right to arrest me; especially if I am living under the Matriarchy of the Amazons, as I am willing to assume for the sake of argument. She has no more right to assume my mother’s position, in order to appeal to my emotions, than to put on my mother’s veil and bonnet in order to borrow half a crown. The policewoman only does what she does, and only dares to what she does, because she could at any moment summon the brute force of the constabulary to kick any of her protegés into our detestable jails. Under those circumstances there is nothing of the spontaneous sympathy of a mother, or even of a friend. The pretence is just as repulsive as if an ordinary big blue policeman suddenly embraced us in the street, wept on our necks and swore we were his long-lost brothers; all the time having his whistle and truncheon ready to knock us down, if we did not reciprocate his sentiments.”

G.K. Chesterton “The Policeman as a Mother” in New Witness November 14, 1919 reprinted in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)