Posts in Social policy
Words Worth Noting - March 19, 2023

“It is the peasants who preserve all traditions of the sites of battles or the building of churches. It is they who remember, so far as anyone remembers, the glimpses of fairies or the graver wonders of saints. In the classes above them the supernatural has been slain by the supercilious. That is a true and tremendous text in Scripture which says that ‘where there is no vision the people perish.’ But it is equally true in practice that where there is no people the visions perish.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News, July 30, 1910, quoted in “GKC on Scripture – Conducted by Peter Floriani” “Proverbs Part 2” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the G.K. Chesterton Society Vol. 25 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2022)

Words Worth Noting - March 15, 2023

“Lord Salisbury’s observation that ‘no lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust in experts’”

Michael Mandelbaum in New York Times June 16, 1985 [and widely quoted online but not, in any examples I found, with further attribution as to when or where Salisbury said it].

Words Worth Noting - March 7, 2023

“Do you really want a safe place? Is that what you want? You want to be so weak that you want to be protected from threat. What the hell kind of life is that? You’re a paralyzed rabbit in a hole. That’s no life for a human being. You should be confronting danger and the unknown and malevolence. And the reason for that, too, is – this is the weird paradox – and I believe this is the paradox, first of all, that was discovered in part by Buddha but also laid forth very clearly in Christianity, which is that: The solution to the problem of tragedy and malevolence is the willingness to face them.”

Jordan Peterson on Instagram (audio and CC which I transcribed) Sept. 24, 2022 [https://www.instagram.com/reel/Ci5ZIf1pm5s/?igshid=YWZlMWU5YjI%3D].