“‘There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.’”
C.S. Lewis, quoted by Douglas Jackson in Gilbert! magazine January-February 2002
“Generally speaking, the ordinary man should be content with the terrible secret that men are men – which is another way of saying that they are brothers.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Oct. 8, 1910, quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #5 (March 2004)
“There is no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the interval.”
Santayana, quoted by Jon Winokur, ed. Zen to Go
On Tuesday I joined Alex Pierson to discuss the ugly mix of ideological and partisan dysfunction behind MP Jenica Atwin’s decision to leave the Green Party for the welcoming Liberals over extreme anti-Israel views she then suddenly claimed she’d never held.
“The Declaration of the Rights of Man at the end of the eighteenth century was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that from then on Man, and not God’s command or the customs of history, should be the source of Law.”
Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism
On the Crown & Crozier podcast I discuss Magna Carta, church, state and you.
“The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.”
G.K. Chesterton What I Saw In America
“Unless a louse could really leap, believe you me, She wouldn’t go walking on that weave, it was so threadbare.”
William Langland Piers Plowman (edited, introduced and annotated by Elizabeth D. Kirk and Judith H. Anderson) Passus V ll. 196-97 (describing Covetousness’ shabby appearance)