“A boy plays at being a soldier or at being a brigand, but have you ever known a boy who played at being a lawyer? A child does not want self-government. A child wants to have a good time; and it is our business, who know how short but how creative is his time in Eden, to give him a good time. But you cannot have a good time if you have self-government. Personal self-government is a most horrible nuisance. Public self-government is worse.”

G.K. Chesterton “Childish Talk About Children” reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022) [yes it’s a lot of Chesterton this week; I can’t help it that he was so wise and so eloquent].

In my latest Epoch Times column I say the big problem with Canada’s federal ethics commissioner isn’t the Liberals making a mockery of the post, it’s that we’re trying to substitute technical expertise for character.

“We must tell him to mind his mind.”

G.K. Chesterton “Gates and Gate-Crashers” in Sidelights quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 2022

“The mind must be enlarged to see the simple things.”

G.K. Chesterton “A Simple Thought” in The Thing quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 2022

“Science in the modern sense consists not in a man trying to know what he does not know, but in his pretending not to know what he does know.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News February 27, 1926, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 2022

“The final outcome of critical consciousness, however, need not be that we are sure of nothing. It can lead to our being graced with a ‘second naïveté.’ We are indebted to philosopher Paul Ricouer for that happy phrase….. Having come to recognize that things could theoretically be other than they are, we are brought to the perception that they are as we thought them to be; but on the far side of all our questioning, we know that in a way we did not know it before.”

Richard John Neuhaus Death on a Friday Afternoon [I believe it’s from that book though my notes were slightly cryptic and in any case it’s definitely Neuhaus]

“Evil ideas are at the root of all this enormous evil which plagues the world at present.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 2, 1917, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)

In my latest Mercatornet article I say that what matters in the upcoming U.S. election is not what the people involved would have you focus on.