“We are in the strict sense conservatives; because we hold that the old creed and culture of Christendom realized for men, relatively to all that is reasonable and possible, the great art of life which we call liberty. The truth has made us free; The tradition has given to men the sort of liberty they really like; Local customs, individual craftsmanship, variety of self expression, the presence of personality in production, the dignity of the human will. These are expressed in a thousand things, from hospitality to adventure, from parents instructing their own children to children inventing their own games, from the village commune to the vin du pays, from practical jokes to pilgrimages an from patron saints to public-house signs. The mark of all these things is variety and spontaneity, the direct action of the individual soul on the material environment of mankind. The result is a rich complexity of common things, a wealth of work and worship, a treasure which we refuse to abandon at our resolute to defend.”

G.K. Chesterton in the 3rd edition of G.K.’s Weekly March-September 1926 quoted by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #2 (Nov.-Dec. 2021)

“fairy land arouses [in the child] a longing for he knows not what.”

C.S. Lewis quoted by David W. Fagerberg in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 17 #1 (9-10/13)

In an interview with Barry W. Bussey of the First Freedoms Foundation I discuss why Magna Carta is still relevant to our liberties and Constitutional order today, including religions freedom.

“If we had no faults of our own, we would not take so much pleasure in noticing those of others.”

La Rochefoucauld, quoted in Globe & Mail October 18, 1999

“[T]he absorption of the man and the exclusion of other matters show not how dull the subject is, but how fascinating it is. Because a man refuses to come out of Eden, they assume that he is being detained in gaol.”

G.K. Chesterton on absorption in apparently trivial hobbies, in “A Defence of Bores,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton

“The intolerant myth may come from the fact that ‘tolerance’ is a vague term that is largely undefined. It does tend to elicit an emotional response. Tolerance is a good thing and is meant to serve justice. So if someone disagrees with me on an essential matter of the faith, I have to be very tolerant of the person, accepting and open to them, but that does not mean I should accept their ideas in a kind of moral relativism.”

“Rev. Eric Nicolai, with the communications office of Opus Dei in Montreal” asked in an e-mail conversation about the organization’s sinister image, in Ottawa Citizen October 7, 2002

‘‘My very dear sons, it is better never to undertake any high enterprise than to abandon it when once begun….’”

Pope Gregory, in reply to an appeal from St. Augustine of Canterbury and others to be excused from attempting to evangelize the English nation because “they were appalled at the idea of going to a barbarous, fierce, and pagan nation, of whose very language they were ignorant”, quoted in Bede A History of the English Church and People

“Re the notion that we don’t need democracy because God gave us shari’a, approving of democracy despite everything means respecting humans sufficiently to respect even their errors, as well as recognizing that your own are likely to be no less serious for being less evident to you.”

Another of mine, from December 20, 2001