In my latest Epoch Times column I explain why we talk a lot less about free speech than we used to, and a lot less convincingly.
“there are aspects of our experience which hint at an incompleteness in what we are and that encourage the expectation of a fulfilment whose ground could only be in something or someone other than ourselves. Peter Berger has drawn our attention to ‘signals of transcendence’ found in every life: (a) an argument from order (essentially the intuition that history is not a tale told by an idiot; the parental role of comforting a frightened child is not the acting of a loving lie); (b) an argument from play (cheerfulness, not to say joy, keeps breaking in); (c) an argument from hope (something is held to lie in the future which is necessary to the completion of the present); (d) an argument from damnation (our outrage at Hitler and Stalin is an intuition of the transcendent moral seriousness of the world); (e) an argument from humour (there is a perceived incongruity in our experience which ‘reflects the imprisonment of the human spirit in the world’). I would want to add to these an argument from mathematics. The nature of that subject is a hotly disputed philosophical question, but for many of its practitioners its pursuit has the character of discovery rather than construction. They would agree with St Augustine that ‘men do not criticise it like examiners but rejoice in it like discoverers’. Here is the intimation of an independent world of everlasting truth which we are able to explore.”
John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
“Man is born ridiculous, as can easily be seen if you look at him soon after he is born.”
G.K. Chesterton, “Shaw, The Philosopher,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton
“Many moderns treat taste as if it were a matter of morality. I can only hope that they do not treat morality as a matter of taste.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News Sept. 1, 1906 quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (November-December 2021)
“suddenly, sex is something we chat about at Starbucks, while God is something we read about by flashlight under the covers.”
Dahlia Lithwick in Ottawa Citizen October 24, 1999
“the only serious reason which I can imagine inducing any one person to listen to any other is, that the first person looks to the second person with an ardent faith and a fixed attention, expecting him to say what he does not expect him to say…. clearly it is quite true that whenever we go to hear a prophet or teacher we may or may not expect wit, we may or may not expect eloquence, but we do expect what we do not expect. We may not expect the true, we may not even expect the wise, but we do expect the unexpected. If we do not expect the unexpected, why do we go there at all? If we expect the expected, why do we not sit at home and expect it by ourselves?”
G.K. Chesterton Heretics
“If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable.”
Seneca Epistulae Morales #71 section 3 quoted (among many other places) by https://libquotes.com/seneca/quote/lbt5f6w
“miracle: the liberty of God; an event that means Materialism is nonsense.”
G.K. Chesterton, “The Romance of Orthodoxy” in Orthodoxy and “An Example and a Question” in Irish Impressions according to “Chesternitions” in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #3 (Dec. 2003)