“The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.”
Richard John Neuhaus in First Things March 2000
“Liberty is traditional and conservative; it remembers its legends and its heroes. But tyranny is always young and seemingly innocent, and asks us to forget the past.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News December 30, 1911, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)
“We never let a quarrel interrupt a good argument.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted as header quotation by Chris Chan in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)
“trying to say (at the same time) that God does not exist, and that He ought to be ashamed of existing, or possibly that he ought to be ashamed of not existing; an artistic effect that depends on belief. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The End of the Moderns,” in The Common Man and “Introductory Remarks,” in Heretics in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #1 (Sept. 2002)
“Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.”
James Baldwin, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go
“We are oppressed today. Not by the most antiquated traditions, but actually by the most recent fashions.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness January 2, 1920, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)
Journalist W.R. “Titterton tells of an interview with the Aga Khan, in which His Highness said that if a wall fell and crushed his foot he would exclaim: ‘This is the best thing that could have happened to me.’ To which Chesterton responded, ‘Then I feel inclined to retort that the Persian language must be singularly deficient in expletives.’”
An author whose name I failed to record in Gilbert! Magazine Vol. 2 #6 Issue 15 (April-May, 1999)
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the proposal to exempt Quebec MNAs from an oath of allegiance to our actual Constitution in favour of some pompous make-believe is a dangerous relativist attack on the rule of law.