“The Spirit of the Age, ironically, is the worst enemy of the Age. It is what destroys it. The first lesson of the book Orthodoxy [by G.K. Chesterton] is that a bad philosophy, when taken to its logical conclusion, when reduced to its essence, is insane. It is single-minded nonsense, ‘the clear, well-lit prison of one idea.’ Lesson two is that it ends not just in madness, but in self destruction. Thus, a society that gives him to frivolous divorce will have frivolous marriage. A society that tolerates cohabitation, contraception, and abortion, will find itself without families – and eventually without a society. And a society that gives into the fiction of transgenderism will end up not being able to define anything. The war on words will lead to meaninglessness, to blathering nonsense, the sort of dialogue one would expect to hear in a padded cell. The attack on language – emptying commonly understood words of their meaning, even to the point of making words mean exactly what they do not say, and giving meaning to words that are simply nonsense, and then to substitute catchwords for actual thinking – is part of the attack on reason that marks the Spirit of the Age.”

Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)

“I believe I am responsible precisely as I believe I am awake. If I choose to say that I was at this moment in a dream, and it did not matter what I did, nobody could possibly offer any final proof that I was not in a dream. This is plain, for the simple reason that no one could offer any proof that might not be offered in a dream. But if I ate all the family’s breakfast, and then told them they were a dream family, you would say simply that I was mad. That is all that real philosophy has to say about a determinist – he is mad. ‘Mad’ does not mean stupid or illogical, or without arguments; madmen always have excellent arguments. ‘Mad’ means fixed in a mental position which cannot be reconciled with actual human life. Any belief is insane, which makes most of a man's human words and acts unmeaning…”

G.K. Chesterton in The London Opinion June 9, 1906, reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)

“Chesterton calls Jerusalem, ‘the shoulder of the world,’ a place that demonstrates the truth of ‘the hardest of all the hard sayings of supernaturalism: that there is such a thing as holy and unholy ground.’”

Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #5 (March 2004) discussing [and I presume quoting] G.K. Chesterton’s 1920 account of his travels to Palestine in The New Jerusalem

“The chief aim of order is to give room for good things to run wild.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted as header quotation by Fr. Robert Wild in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)

“‘man will live forevermore because of Christmas day,’ as Harry Belafonte put it in those more confident times a mere 40 years ago…”

Mark Steyn in National Post December 24, 1999 [so 60 years ago now and the cultural and intellectual situation has not improved]

“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)