“After all, what would life be without fighting, I should like to know? From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man. Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts and habits in himself, or spiritual wickedness in high places, or Russians, or Border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them. It is no good for Quakers, or any other body of men to uplift their voices against fighting. Human nature is too strong for them, and they don’t follow their own precepts. Every soul of them is doing his own piece of fighting, somehow and somewhere. The world might be a better world without fighting, for anything I know, but it wouldn’t be our world; and therefore I am dead against crying peace when there is no peace, and isn’t meant to be. I am as sorry as any man to see folk fighting the wrong people and wrong things, but I’d a deal sooner see them doing that, than that they should have no fight in them.”

Thomas Hughes Tom Brown’s Schooldays

“There is a kind of God-shaped hole in many people’s lives…”

John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist

“A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.”

C.S. Lewis, quoted in Joseph Pearce Literary Converts

“You have not come back from hell with empty hands.”

A handwritten note from André Malraux to Whittaker Chambers about his book Witness, quoted by William F. Buckley Jr. in National Review August 6, 2001 (adding “I remembered the gratitude Chambers felt” on receiving it.

“this life of dust and broken bottles”.

Mark Studdock realizing with horror that he’d spent his whole life doing things he didn’t enjoy to impress people he didn’t like, in C.S. Lewis That Hideous Strength

“‘All ‘progressive’ thought has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security and avoidance of pain…. Hitler, because in his joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.’”

Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The Atlantic Monthly February 2002

“We deliberate not about ends but about means.”

Aristotle Ethics

“If chemicals had power of choice, it would be impossible to be certain that a chemical experiment would come off. If an acid ever prayed not to be led into temptation, chemistry would not be an exact science.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 19, 1913 quoted in Gilbert Magazine 9-10/08