“It is better to be defeated than to confess defeat in advance.”
William Jennings Bryan in a letter to his brother Charles in 1920, quoted in Robert W. Cherny, A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan
“But by the mid-twentieth century, God was killed off in the public mind – or if not killed, then badly disabled…”
William D. Gairdner The Trouble With Democracy
They describe rural New Hampshire churches in March 1968 with spires “pointing the way toward salvation and a God who was, by most current accounts, either dead or hiding out in Argentina. It was going to be a bad year.”
William W. Prochenau & Richard W. Larsen, A Certain Democrat: Senator Henry M. Jackson A Political Biography
“I can listen patiently to a Communist repeating for hours at a time that Property is unnecessary, because men must surrender selfish interests to social ideals. I only begin to break the furniture when somebody starts to prove that Property is necessary, because men are all selfish and every man must look after himself. The case for Property is not that a man must look after himself; but, on the contrary, that a normal man has to look after other people, if it be simply a wife and family. It is that this unit should have an economic basis for its social independence. If he were considering only himself, he might be more independent as a vagabond; he might be more secure as a serf. But the point at the moment is that I like Property because it is a noble thing. I can respect the revolutionist who dislikes it because it is an ignoble thing. But I have no truck with the cynic who likes it because it is ignoble.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The New Dark Ages” in G.K.’s Weekly May 21, 1927, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 9 # 8, Issue 73 (July-August 2006)
“Now that God is dead, however, or at least comatose”
Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic Monthly March 2004
“Perhaps the world is divided into those who laugh first and think afterwards, and those who think first and laugh afterwards.”
G.K. Chesterton in American Review September 1935, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2008)
In my latest National Post column I argue that the solution to toxic anger in politics, far easier said than done, is neither to cause nor succumb to it.
“It is perhaps not altogether a coincidence that the year 1882, in which Darwin died, found Nietzsche proclaiming that ‘God is dead… and we have killed him.’”
Dan Peterson “What’s the Big Deal about Intelligent Design” in The American Spectator December 2005-January 2006