“The sincere controversialist is above all things a good listener.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted in an editorial in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2008).
“The progressive person comes by, saying gaily, ‘Why confine your soaring soul within the mere formularies of currants, suet, and eggs? Take anything, anything that this varied Cosmos has evolved. Every brick in the street is a potential pudding. Poisons are but a blundering search after pudding. Make your universal Christmas pudding out of materials as universal as the spirit of Christmas. Make it of glue, soot, potato peelings, blacking, hog’s-wash, rags, bones, rubbish, Spiritual Healers, Hygienic Marriages, Eastern Pessimism, flying teacups, Prussian Atheists, and Nut Sausages – and your Christmas pudding will be Larger, Broader, and more Mystic.’ To which I reply, ‘All right, so long as it tastes like Christmas pudding.’ But it doesn’t.”
G.K. Chesterton “A Progressive Yule to You, Too” from Illustrated London News Jan. 1, 1910, reprinted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #3 (Dec. 2006)
In my latest National Post column I ponder the gleeful way many people welcome the development of AI that’s better than us at everything, and ask whether at Christmastime in particular we can’t find something to cherish in our fallible, all-too-human fellows and selves.
"A pessimist is a person who has not had enough experience to be a cynic."
Mary Pettibone Poole, quoted as "Thought du jour" in Globe & Mail July 27, 2001
“family: the thing on which all civilization is built; the idea that a man and a woman should live largely for the next generation and that they should, to some extent, defer their personal amusements, such as divorce and dissipation, for the benefit of the next generation.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 22, 1911, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #5 (March 2003)
“The pessimists who attack the Universe are always under this disadvantage. They have an exhilarating consciousness that they could make the sun and moon better; but they also have the depressing consciousness that they could not make the sun and moon at all.”
G.K. Chesterton in Charles Dickens, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 No. 4 (Jan.-Feb. 2000)
“Dare to be naive."
R. Buckminster Fuller, quoted on www.goodreads.com/quotes/37173-dare-to-be-naive
“I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.”
Roberto Rossellini, quoted as "Thought du jour" in "Social Studies" in Globe & Mail July 7, 2004