“While men perform their social duties faithfully, they do all that society or the state can with propriety demand or expect; and remain responsible only to their Maker for their religion, or modes of faith, which they may prefer or profess.”
George Washington in W.B. Allen Compiler and Editor George Washington: A Collection.
“When it [Queen’s University] opened its first classes in 1842, its first professor, the Reverend Peter Colin Campbell, taught classical literature. In its Memorial Room to the school’s war dead, there is an inscription around the wall, from Wordsworth, another provocative conditional: ‘We must be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold which Milton held.’”
Joseph Brean in National Post January 26, 2024 [heckling the way Queen’s was handling its funding crisis].
“and if there be some harder, better way to salvation than to follow that which we believe to be good, then we are all damned.”
Lord Dunsany, Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley
“If truth is relative, to what is it relative?”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News June 2, 1906, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“The history of mankind is the history of ideas.”
Ludwig von Mises Planned Chaos [1st sentence of “The Liberation of the Demons”]
“The whole conscious and subconscious trend of modernism is the distrust, and even the detestation, of the ordinary man.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness March 9, 1916, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“Charlemagne receives a buffet that goes near to bring him down: the voice of St Gabriel, rallying him, has that tart stringency which distinguishes the Divine word from pious vapourings: ‘And what’, said he, ‘art thou about, great King?’”
Dorothy L. Sayers’ introduction to The Song of Roland
“The Modern Mind is so called to distinguish it from the Mind.”
G.K. Chesterton in America March 15, 1930, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)