“There is, however, another good work that is done by detective stories. While it is the constant tendency of the Old Adam to rebel against so universal and automatic a thing as civilization, to preach departure and rebellion, the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions. By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates. When the detective in a police romance stands alone, and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves’ kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful knighterrancy. This form of art, like every form of art down to a comic song, has the whole truth of the universe behind it.”

G.K. Chesterton in “In Defence of Detective Stories” in The Defendant, quoted by Fr. Robert Wild in a piece on Catherine Doherty in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)

“I began listening more carefully to what my father had to say after the Churchill speech, for my father was clear in his own mind about where his loyalties lay. Having known persecution in Poland [he was Jewish], having served with his brothers in the British Army during the First World War, and having been a fierce patriot in his land of adoption, my father was an outspoken advocate of British freedom. ‘This is the one place where people are still free,’ he would tell me. ‘If you have to choose between giving in and fighting, fight; just remember that. Fight with everything you’ve got.’”

Jack Maurice Nissen Winning the Radar War

“in order that life should be a story or romance to us, it is necessary that a great part of it, at any rate, should be settled for us without our permission. If we wish life to be a system, this may be a nuisance; but if we wish it to be a drama, it is an essential…. A man has control over many things in his life; he has control over enough things to be the hero of a novel. But if he had control over everything, there would be so much hero that there would be no novel. And the reason why the lives of the rich are at bottom so tame and uneventful is simply that they can choose the events…. It is vain for the supercilious moderns to talk of being in uncongenial surroundings. To be in a romance is to be in uncongenial surroundings…. the moderns, who imagine that romance would exist most perfectly in a complete state of what they call liberty…. They say they wish to be, as strong as the universe, but they really wish the whole universe as weak as themselves.”

G.K. Chesterton Heretics

“We mean business now, and we are determined to gain our rightful place in God’s world. We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God’s children. And that we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.”

Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech, in Memphis, Tenn., April 3, 1968 [the day before he was assassinated] quoted by Jamil Jivani in National Post January 17, 2023

In my latest Epoch Times column I condemn the edict that military chaplains should not pray to God rather than the state on November 11.

“Kierkegaard talks about the idea of being a knight of faith, and he is classed with the Christian existentialists as a consequence of the practicalities of his view. He basically puts forward a proposition that I think is akin to the proposition that undergirds marriage, which is: You cannot find out whether creation is good or evil without being all in on your bet, just like you cannot be married without saying, ‘I am shackling myself to you and I am not going to run away no matter what, so we better get to know each other and get along because this is how it is going to be.’ Without that, you cannot be deeply committed enough to the marriage to make it work. So it seems to me on the forefront of faith, you have to act in the world with courageous trust – not naïve trust, but courageous trust – in the potential goodness of being in order to actually discover whether or not that faith is justified. And that is partly why it is faith; you have to put the cart before the horse. You cannot wait around.”

Jordan Peterson “Mondays of Meaning – March 20th 2023”

“Gabor Maté For mainstreaming the notion that there’s no such thing as normal”

#2 on Maclean’s “The Power List: 2023” in the health care category, in Maclean’s March 16, 2023 [totally, and predictably, missing the paradox that he made it normal to think there’s no normal... plus how could you treat a condition if you didn’t know how it normally worked and to what it normally responded?].

“can the view that all religions are equivalent really be taken seriously? If such is the case, how should one explain that, on their occasion of the rebuilding of the main Aztec temple in 1487, more than 20,000 people were bled to death over four days on the altars of Tenochtitlan, in the upper Mexico valley, as human sacrifices to the sun god?”

Richard Bastien in Convivium Vol. 2 #7 (April-May 2013)