“‘What does my life matter? I just want to be faithful, to the end, to the child I used to be.’”
Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) quoted in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #5 (March 2000)
“This means open war between men, in which everyone is obliged to take sides, either with the dogmatists or with the sceptics, because anyone who imagines he can stay neutral is a sceptic par excellence.”
Blaise Pascal Pensées
“The object of all human life is play. I for one wish we did not have to fritter away time on frivolous things, like lectures and literature, the time we might have given to serious, solid and constructive work like cutting out cardboard figures and pasting colored tinsel upon them.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted by Robert Moore-Jumonville in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 3 #5 (March 2000)
“We cannot begin by forming independently a theory of how God is knowable and then seek to test it out or indeed to actualize it and fill it with material content. How God can be known must be determined from first to last by the way in which He actually is known.”
Thomas Torrance, quoted in John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
In my latest National Post column I ask how I, of all people, could be a lonely voice of balanced reason on the truckers’ protests.
“The moment a thing has ceased to be a paradox it is in immediate peril of becoming a platitude. It is in peril of becoming one of those things that are accepted ‘in principle’ by all unprincipled men.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #11 (September-October 2021)
“You cannot evade the issue of God, whether you talk about pigs or the binomial theory, you are still talking about Him. Now if Christianity be… a fragment of metaphysical nonsense invented by a few people, then, of course, defending it will simply mean talking that metaphysical nonsense over and over again. But if Christianity should happen to be true – that is to say, if its God is the real God of the universe – then defending it may mean talking about anything or everything. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News December 12, 1903 , quoted in Dale Ahlquist and Peter Floriani Chesterton University Student Handbook
In my latest NP Platformed newsletter I say Whoopi Goldberg’s racially insensitive and obtuse comments on the Holocaust might actually help us move back toward sanity on race, and on cancel culture as well.