“From the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
Immanuel Kant, quoted in Brian Lee Crowley The Road to Equity
“‘There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.’”
C.S. Lewis, quoted by Douglas Jackson in Gilbert! magazine January-February 2002
“Generally speaking, the ordinary man should be content with the terrible secret that men are men – which is another way of saying that they are brothers.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Oct. 8, 1910, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #5 (March 2004)
“There is no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the interval.”
Santayana, quoted by Jon Winokur, ed. Zen to Go
“The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.”
G.K. Chesterton What I Saw In America
“This life in us... however low it flickers or fiercely burns, is still a divine flame which no man dare presume to put out, be his motives never so humane and enlightened. To suppose otherwise is to countenance a death-wish. Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.”
Malcolm Muggeridge Something Beautiful for God
In my latest Loonie Politics column I say we can’t tell whether Quebec is “a nation” until we decide what that term means… and while we’re at it maybe we should try to figure out whether Canada still fits the definition.
“fairy tales founded in me two convictions; first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness. But I found the whole modern world running like a high tide against both my tendernesses; and the shock of that collision created two sudden and spontaneous sentiments, which... have since hardened into convictions. First, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it could never have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been scarlet…. But the great determinists of the nineteenth century were strongly against this native feeling … In fact, according to them, nothing ever really had happened since the beginning of the world. Nothing ever had happened since existence had happened; and even about the date of that they were not very sure. The modern world as I found it was solid for modern Calvinism, for the necessity of things being as they are. But when I came to ask them I found they had really no proof of this unavoidable repetition in things except the fact that the things were repeated. Now, the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational…. one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot.”
G.K. Chesterton Orthodoxy