“A strange strand of eternal pathos runs through dreams which comes from the very loom of life itself. Dreams are, if I may so express it, like life only more so. Dreams, like life, are full of nobility and joy utterly arbitrary and incalculable. We have gratitude, but never certainty.”

G.K. Chesterton, “The Meaning of Dreams,” reprinted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2005)

In my latest National Post column I say democracies for all their failings still beat tyranny hollow because we can ask people who want power what they’d do with it and why.

Question from a student: “I’m scared of metaphysics. A friend of mine wrote an essay for another course, in which he denied the persistence of personal identity. According to my friend, since some things about me have changed during the last two years, the me of today isn’t the same as the me of two years ago. We are literally different persons. This is deeply disturbing."
Reply: "... if my personal identity has no persistence, then how could ‘I’ find it disturbing? The problem with your friend’s argument isn’t metaphysical reasoning, but flawed metaphysical reasoning... there must be a real you that persists through the changes. If that weren’t true, then it wouldn’t even make sense for you to say “I have changed” -- because at the moment of the change, “I” would have ceased to exist.... Metaphysics is just thinking carefully about what the real world is like.... Trust me. You exist.”

J. Budziszewski "Underground Thomist" July 22, 2019

“The things I like arguing about are absolute things; whether a proof is logical or whether a practice is just.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Dec. 17, 1927, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2008)

“The fact that… we still live well cannot ease the pain of feeling that we no longer live nobly.”

John Updike, quoted by ordained minister Kevin Little in an Op Ed in the Ottawa Citizen June 13, 2002

In my other speech to the Augustine College Summer Seminar in June, and again I apologize for the delay in getting it edited and posted, I talked about what classical Greece and Rome got right about political freedom and what they did not, how medieval England completed the picture with Magna Carta to limit government in theory and parliament to limit it in practice, and how and why things went wrong in the modern world.

“Pessimism insists on the shortness of human life in order to show that life is valueless. Religion insists on the shortness of human life in order to show that life is frightfully valuable – is almost horribly valuable. Pessimism says that life is so short that it gives nobody a chance; religion says that life is so short that it gives everybody his final chance.”

G.K. Chesterton, “Nicholas Nickleby”, in Appreciations and Criticisms of Charles Dickens, quoted in “Chesterton’s Mail Bag” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2007)

“Odd comparison: ‘Believing in God is like believing in Zeus.’ They aren’t even ‘gods’ in the same sense of the term. Zeus was a contingent being which something else caused to exist. God is the necessary being who causes all else to exist.”

J. Budziszewski in "Underground Thomist" email Feb. 25, 2019