“If we stand still, we shall be frozen to death. If we take the wrong road, we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? ‘Be strong and of a good courage.’ Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. Above all, let us dream no dreams, and tell no lies, but go our way, wherever it may lead, with our eyes open and our heads erect. If death ends all, we cannot meet it better. If not, let us enter whatever may be the next scene like honest men, with no sophistry in our mouths and no masks on our faces.”

End of James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty Equality Fraternity (as the footnote in my copy notes, the quotation is from Deuteronomy XXXI:6-7)

“For all you good folks who think Islam is just Christianity in funny hats, or that Islam is the ‘Religion of Peace’, or that ‘we all worship the same God’ .../ ... nope. None of those are true in the slightest.”

Tweet from Willis Eschenbach 20/4/22 [https://twitter.com/WEschenbach/status/1516845836566626304] commenting on tweet about “Islamic Republic of Iran gives converts to Christianity five years prison for ‘deviant propaganda’ https://wp.me/p4hgqZ-14wY”

“I am inclined to think tradition has more of the sobriety of truth.”

G.K. Chesterton in America July 23, 1927, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2022) [I know I’ve been leaning heavily on GKC in recent items, but when someone says so many prescient things it’s a sign worth noting]

“Most of us have to fight for the things we think true, and especially against the things we are supposed to think true.”

G.K. Chesterton in New Witness 14/4/22 quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 2022

“But in the end, being free means being able to be responsible. And ultimately, ‘it means being responsible to God and not to man.’”

Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec 2021) [the quoted bit almost certainly from G.K. Chesterton in the 3rd edition of G.K.’s Weekly March-September 1926]

“So much must be said against the man of fashion. But, in fairness to him, it must be admitted that he is not alone in being frivolous: other classes of men share the reproach. Thus for instance, bishops are generally frivolous, moral teachers are generally frivolous. Philosophers and poets are often frivolous; politicians are always frivolous. For if frivolity signifies this lack of grasp of the fulness and the value of things, it must have a great many forms besides that of mere levity and pleasure-seeking. A great many people have a fixed idea that irreverence, for instance, consists chiefly in making jokes. But it is quite possible to be irreverent with a diction devoid of the slightest touch of indecorum, and with a soul unpolluted by a tinge of humour.... To say a thing with a touch of humour is not to say it in vain. To say a thing with a touch of satire or individual criticism is not to say it in vain. To say a thing even fantastically, like some fragment from the scripture of Elfand, is not to say it in vain. But to say a thing with a pompous and unmeaning gravity; to say a thing so that it shall be at once bigoted and vague; to say a thing so that it shall be indistinct at the same moment that it is literal; to say a thing so that the most decorous listener shall not at the end of it really know why in the name of all things you should have said it or he should have listened to it – this is veritably and in the weighty sense of those ancient Mosaic words to take that thing in vain. The Name is taken in vain many times more often by preachers than it is by secularists.”

G.K. Chesterton “The Frivolous Man” reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # March-April 2022

“When a soldier complains of his hard life (or a laborer, etc.) try giving him nothing to do.”

Pascal Pensées

“Any man with a large mind ought to be able to write about anything.”

G.K. Chesterton in “What Is Right With The World” quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 2022