“I believe I am responsible precisely as I believe I am awake. If I choose to say that I was at this moment in a dream, and it did not matter what I did, nobody could possibly offer any final proof that I was not in a dream. This is plain, for the simple reason that no one could offer any proof that might not be offered in a dream. But if I ate all the family’s breakfast, and then told them they were a dream family, you would say simply that I was mad. That is all that real philosophy has to say about a determinist – he is mad. ‘Mad’ does not mean stupid or illogical, or without arguments; madmen always have excellent arguments. ‘Mad’ means fixed in a mental position which cannot be reconciled with actual human life. Any belief is insane, which makes most of a man's human words and acts unmeaning…”

G.K. Chesterton in The London Opinion June 9, 1906, reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)

“Chesterton calls Jerusalem, ‘the shoulder of the world,’ a place that demonstrates the truth of ‘the hardest of all the hard sayings of supernaturalism: that there is such a thing as holy and unholy ground.’”

Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 7 #5 (March 2004) discussing [and I presume quoting] G.K. Chesterton’s 1920 account of his travels to Palestine in The New Jerusalem

“The chief aim of order is to give room for good things to run wild.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted as header quotation by Fr. Robert Wild in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)

“‘man will live forevermore because of Christmas day,’ as Harry Belafonte put it in those more confident times a mere 40 years ago…”

Mark Steyn in National Post December 24, 1999 [so 60 years ago now and the cultural and intellectual situation has not improved]

In my latest Loonie Politics column I render “We Three Kings” if they were bearing Grit Red, Tory Blue and Dipper Orange… and prefer the original.

“The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said that the only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.”

Richard John Neuhaus in First Things March 2000

In my latest National Post column, I write to Santa listing things I could really do without this year… and they all come from the government.

“Liberty is traditional and conservative; it remembers its legends and its heroes. But tyranny is always young and seemingly innocent, and asks us to forget the past.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News December 30, 1911, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)