“We need metaphors of magic and monsters in order to understand the human condition.”

Stephen Donaldson, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail May 25, 2007 [to which I add “Yes, but why?”]

“To die for one's country means to live forever”.

A letter from Marko Milosevic about his father Slobodan, who did not have a priest at his interment because he was an atheist, quoted with appropriate critique in OpinionJournal March 20, 2006

“Tourism was the source of history’s original failure of cultural understanding. Cyril Aldred writes that ancient Greek and Roman vacationers in Egypt ‘never really understood Egyptian religion and were inclined to see in inexplicable acts and beliefs a more profound significance than actually existed.’ Thus the concept of the ‘inscrutable Orient,’ the idea of the ‘mysterious East.’”

P.J. O’Rourke in The Atlantic Monthly September 2002

“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