On retiring he was planning to start reading and contemplating. But while the contemplative life is important “in what sense could one man’s contemplative life take on such grandiose proportions that it could be viewed as ‘for the good of human society’? Most of the ‘solitary contemplatives’ I know these days are pondering stuff a good bit removed from the ‘good of human society.’… It was at this critical log jam in my thinking that my wife earned her keep, signing me up at church for a ‘men’s group.’ I was initially skeptical, to say the least. Participation in such groups has always struck me as something akin to walking on red-hot coals. I have visions of guys dropping all their comfortable, manly gruff and gusto, squeamishly ‘sharing’ stories of personal picadilloes best kept to themselves, just before they completely unman themselves with a torrent of tears. But it didn’t turn out that way at all. This ‘men’s group’ was instead a first cousin to the bookish life – a Shakespeare reading group, where for three years now our little band of brothers has read from the Bard’s best every Sunday night, shouted hearty toasts over ale, and argued ad infinitum (in a very masculine manner), about the meaning of the very masculine life!”

Mark Johnson in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 3-4/22

“You assume that the defining characteristic of a religion is that it is a religion. No. The defining characteristic of a religion is whether it is right or wrong.”

Michael Coren (back when he was sensible) in an e-mail debate with Karen Selick in Western Standard October 25, 2004.

“But my time and labour was little worth, and so it was as well employed one way as another.”

Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe

“We are trying to do right: one of the wildest perils.”

G.K. Chesterton in Daily News September 28, 1907, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)

“my own resolve is at rock bottom, believing the best that can happen to me is to be wounded, since becoming wounded or killed is a certainty. I find comfort in an honest belief that may be God-given, that no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse. This I firmly belief, and often repeat it to others. It seems to give me some strength. And I have developed faith in the beatitude ‘The meek shall inherit the earth.’ While this doesn’t seem to apply in civilian life, many a meek man displays the fortitude and resolve to carry on here, while many a swashbuckler finds the first way out.”

Bob Suckling, a platoon commander with the RCR at Verrières Ridge, who had just found his batman dead from concussion without a mark on his body and had a lance-corporal shoot himself in the foot right under his nose, quoted in George Blackburn The Guns of Normandy

“Again, the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value.”

Martin Capages Jr. on substack [https://martincapagesjrphdpe.substack.com/p/c-s-lewis-on-climate-change-and-the] quoting C.S. Lewis God in the Dock [https://books.google.ca/books?id=loE7BAAAQBAJ&pg=PA350&lpg=PA350&dq]

“I was eating this orange on a busy Friday afternoon and thinking ‘Dagnabbit, this thing is so juicy it’s getting all over everything.’”

One of mine, from May 17, 2002, illustrating how easy it is to slide into ingratitude.

In my latest Epoch Times column I say it’s actually good news that about two-thirds of Canadians in a poll said they think “everything is broken in this country right now” because we still expect better and have not spiraled into rage, paranoia or, worst of all, resignation.