“Political conflict, domestic or international, is rooted in the nature of man. It is a reflection of his finitude, his moral weakness, and his irrationality.”
Ernest W. Lefever Ethics and United States Foreign Policy
“It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word. The Crusade without the Cross is a dead word.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Jan. 12, 1924, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol 10 #5 (March 2007)
“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Riddle of the Ivy” in Tremendous Trifles, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 No. 4 (Jan/Feb. 2000)
“The view that human beings are by nature good and reasonable creatures who can compose their differences peacefully is incompatible with what we know of human behavior in recorded history. It is starkly utopian.... Order can exist without justice and freedom, as we well know, but justice and freedom cannot exist without order.”
Sidney Hook in American Spectator July 1988
Christie Heffner “told the [Chicago] Sun-Times, ‘pornography is a word used by critics to demonize sexual images they don’t approve of.’ Failing to follow up properly, the reporters neglected to ask Ms. Hefner why she thinks ‘to demonize’ is a bad thing.”
Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #8, July/August 2000
“Like a true philosopher, Flambeau had no aim in his holiday; but, like a true philosopher, he had an excuse. He had a sort of half purpose, which he took just so seriously that its success would crown the holiday, but just so lightly that its failure would not spoil it.”
G.K. Chesterton Favorite Father Brown Stories
“Only the concept of eternity could explain the ambiguity between a loving God and the Holocaust. For if life does not end with the grave, we should pity the prison guard, not his victim.”
Edward F. Halpin who “was at Buchenwald with Patton’s Third Army”, quoted by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things March 2001
“The night was gone. The morning star was shining in the sky. I too had become a completely different person. The student of the Talmud, the child that I was, had been consumed in the flames. There remained only a shape that looked like me. A dark flame had entered into my soul and devoured it.”
Eli Wiesel Night