“pessimist: a person who thinks everything is bad except himself.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Flag of the World” in Orthodoxy, quoted in “Chesternitions” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 7 # 7 (June 2004)
“the present era, by and large since the end of the First World War, has returned to the practice and theory of radical hedonism.... We are a society of notoriously unhappy people: lonely, anxious, depressed, destructive, dependent - people who are glad when we have killed the time we are trying so hard to save.”
Erich Fromm To Have and To Be p. xxvii.
“That's what's important, to feel useful in this old world, to hit a lick against what's wrong, or to say a word for what's right even though you get walloped for saying that word. Now I may sound like a Bible beater yelling up a revival at a river crossing camp meeting, but that don't change the truth none. There's right and there's wrong. You got to do one or the other. You do the one and you're living. You do the other and you may be walking around, but you're dead as a beaver hat.”
Davy Crockett (John Wayne) in The Alamo (according to en.wikiquote.org)
"If the human mind was simple enough to understand, we’d be too simple to understand it."
Emerson Pugh, quoted on www.hound-dog-media.com
“Unlike the case of Philosophy, where no answer to its question is ever possible, there must be an answer to the great question of Political Economy. How – so it first asked – does mankind produce enough goods for the wants of mankind? That has been answered long ago. How can mankind adjust its production so as not to oversatisfy some, undersatisfy others, and break down in the process? That has not been answered.”
Stephen Leacock "What is Left of Adam Smith?" in On the Front Line of Life
“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.