“You’re never too old to become younger.”
Mae West, quoted on www.goodreads.com
“The progressive person comes by, saying gaily, ‘Why confine your soaring soul within the mere formularies of currants, suet, and eggs? Take anything, anything that this varied Cosmos has evolved. Every brick in the street is a potential pudding. Poisons are but a blundering search after pudding. Make your universal Christmas pudding out of materials as universal as the spirit of Christmas. Make it of glue, soot, potato peelings, blacking, hog’s-wash, rags, bones, rubbish, Spiritual Healers, Hygienic Marriages, Eastern Pessimism, flying teacups, Prussian Atheists, and Nut Sausages – and your Christmas pudding will be Larger, Broader, and more Mystic.’ To which I reply, ‘All right, so long as it tastes like Christmas pudding.’ But it doesn’t.”
G.K. Chesterton “A Progressive Yule to You, Too” from Illustrated London News Jan. 1, 1910, reprinted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #3 (Dec. 2006)
“At Christmas I see myself as I really am. And as I could be, if I weren’t such a stinker. As the whole sick, weary, unhappy world sees itself as it might be, if it weren’t such a stinker. Noel! Joy! Peace awaits. Killings, brutality, meanness is here. Cry world.”
Frank Capra The Name Above the Title
“G.K. Chesterton said he found it hard to believe in God, but harder to believe that a swamp, if left alone long enough, will eventually build Chartres Cathedral…”
Robert Fulford in National Post Dec. 16, 2006
"real eating will restore his sense of the festivity of being. Food does not exist merely for the sake of its nutritional value. To see it so is only to knuckle under still further to the desubstantialization of man, to regard not what things are, but what they mean to us… A man’s daily meal ought to be an exultation over the smack of desirability which lies at the roots of creation.”
Robert Capon The Supper of the Lamb
“Who is the most read historian of the ancient world? the learned professor asks his class. Tacitus perhaps? Suetonius? Herodotus? All wrong, he’s afraid. The most read and probably most reliable recorder of ancient history was a man known as Luke, the probable author of the Third Gospel of the New Testament and its sequel, the Acts of the Apostles.”
Christian History Project, The Veil is Torn
In my latest National Post column I ponder the gleeful way many people welcome the development of AI that’s better than us at everything, and ask whether at Christmastime in particular we can’t find something to cherish in our fallible, all-too-human fellows and selves.
“family: the thing on which all civilization is built; the idea that a man and a woman should live largely for the next generation and that they should, to some extent, defer their personal amusements, such as divorce and dissipation, for the benefit of the next generation.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 22, 1911, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #5 (March 2003)