“Re the notion that we don’t need democracy because God gave us shari’a, approving of democracy despite everything means respecting humans sufficiently to respect even their errors, as well as recognizing that your own are likely to be no less serious for being less evident to you.”
Another of mine, from December 20, 2001
“He offers a remarkable tribute to the almost forgotten truth that man is never genuinely at home except in goodness, that artistic emotions can no more refresh the nature than a liqueur can quench the thirst.’”
G.K. Chesterton (on Aleister Crowley, whose doctrines he loathed and the one person he refused to debate, but with regard to his book The Soul of Osiris), quoted by Chris Chan in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
“That is so weird about Jeremy wishing he’d never been born. I mean, we have no control over what kinda family we land in! You’re just….. there!’ ‘A newborn baby is totally innocent. Nothing is his fault! If the family you get is bizarre, that’s the way it is! You just gotta survive, that’s all.’ ‘But how do you do that, Becky? How are you supposed to know how to think an’ act an’ live?’ ‘Find someone you trust an’ respect… an’ try to be like them!’ ‘But a baby trusts everyone! That’s the problem… An’ a baby doesn’t even know what “respect” is!’ ‘No… But they know what security is… an’ they know what’s fair!’”
A conversation between three characters in “For Better or Worse” comic in Ottawa Citizen Feb. 6, 2004
“Nature is never novel; the spire of Salisbury Cathedral only has to be seen to remind one that one always knew it was there.”
Malcolm Muggeridge About Kingsmill (1951) in Ian Hunter, ed., The Very Best of Malcolm Muggeridge
“How many men have sold their souls to be admired by fools?”
G. K. Chesterton in “Ring of Lovers” in The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond quoted in “Chesterton For Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)
“When men claimed scientific authority for their ignorance, and police support for their aggressive presumption, it is time for Mr Chesterton and all other men of sense to withstand them sturdily.”
George Bernard Shaw reviewing G.K. Chesterton’s 1922 Eugenics and Other Evils in The Nation. Shaw called it “a graver, harder book” than GKC’s other books, in a good way, and praised his “sledge-hammer directness” and taking a stand, according to Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #3 Jan.-Feb. 2022)
“Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the Unknowable. But there it sits, nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.”
H.L. Mencken, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail April 6, 2009
“As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”
James Madison, quoted by Christopher Buckley in National Review November 22, 1999