"The idea of liberty has ultimately a religious root; that is why men find it so easy to die for and so difficult to define. It refers finally to the fact that, while the oyster and the palm tree have to save their lives by law, man has to save his soul by choice."
G.K. Chesterton, “The Free Man,” in A Miscellany of Men, quoted in Gilbert! Magazine Vol. 6 #3 (December 2002)
In its annual report Freedom House had rated 81 of the world’s countries as providing a high degree of individual liberty. "It is not an accident that a majority of the citizens in 74 of those countries are Christians."
Paul Marshall, a Canadian political scientist and senior fellow with the Centre for Religious Freedom in Washington, D.C., quoted in British Columbia Report April 5, 1999
"If you want to see what a 'contribution' really is, look at Man on the cross. That’s a contribution."
Catherine de Hueck Doherty (an odd mystic Russian émigré who founded Madonna House in the Madawaska Valley) quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things Dec. 2000 p. 67.
"an open mind is salutary, but one whose hinge is off?"
"H. Smith" [according to my detailed but now sadly incomprehensible note as to its origin]
"Symbolism and ritual keep things much simpler than they would otherwise be."
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 14, 1906, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #3 (Dec. 2002).
"The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them."
G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 #7
"Truth unasserted is a lie unopposed."
George Jonas in the National Post Dec. 11, 2010
"It will not do to offer democracy, secularism and licentious living as an alternative to religious extremism. The answer to bad religion is good religion — to put it more elegantly, theology is required to answer the false claims of unreasonable religious positions."
Fr. Raymond J. De Souza in National Post January 31, 2008 (after favourably quoting George Weigel's claim that "It is thus a great folly to think that jihadism and the terrorism it underwrites can be understood in terms drawn primarily from the patois of the therapeutic society, as if jihadist terrorism were some Levantine form of psychiatric aberration. Within their own theological frame of reference and the reading of history it warrants, jihadists are not crazy. They make, to themselves, a terrible kind of sense.")