“it is perfectly permissible and perfectly natural to become bored with a subject just as it is perfectly permissible and perfectly natural to be thrown from a horse or to miss a trail or to look up the answer to a puzzle at the end of the book.”

GKC, “A Defence of Bores,” in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed and Other Essays by G.K. Chesterton

“Attention, application, accuracy, method, punctuality, and despatch, are the principal qualities required for the efficient conduct of business of any sort. These, at first sight, may appear to be small matters; and yet they are of essential importance to human happiness, well-being, and usefulness. They are little things, it is true; but human life is made up of comparative trifles. It is the repetition of little acts which constitute not only the sum of human character, but which determine the character of nations.”

Samuel Smiles Self-Help

“This negligence [by people who simply don’t give religion much thought] in a matter where they themselves, their eternity, their all are at stake, fills me more with irritation than pity; it astounds and appalls me; it seems quite monstrous to me…. One needs no great sublimity of soul to realize that in this life there is no true and solid satisfaction, that all our pleasures are mere vanity, that our afflictions are infinite, and finally that death which threatens us at every moment must in a few years infallibly face us with the inescapable and appalling alternative of being annihilated or wretched throughout eternity.”

Peter Kreeft Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées Edited, Outlined & Explained

“Sir, Friends of the vanishing apostrophe should start with Westminster City Council, whose vans carry the message: ‘Were working for a cleaner City.’ Yours faithfully, PAMELA HUTCHINSON, 6 Cleveland Gardens, W2, March 12.”

Letter in the Times March 14, 1984 [sent to me by my father, a connoisseur of all things rhetorical including sloppy usage and its foes]

IIn my latest Loonie Politics column I urge everyone to consider the long-term consequences for our political culture if the authorities get away with smirking their way through an inquiry and a national security scandal.

“‘Most people have never really been listened to. They live in a lonely silence – no one knowing what they feel, how they live or what they have done…. There are no words to adequately describe what it is like to be free with another person. It is most often a sensing that someone will let us be all of what we are at that moment. We can talk about whatever we wish, express in any way whatever feelings are in our hearts. We can take as much time as we need. We can sit, stand, pace, yell, cry, pound the floor, dance or weep for joy. Whatever and however we are at the moment is accepted and respected…’”

Dr. Carl Faber’s book On Listening, quoted in Valerie Geller Creating Powerful Radio

“Over the centuries, historians and philosophers have put together a certain idea about how Western civilization developed. It began in Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Arabs developed our numbers, the Phoenicians the first phonetic alphabet, the Greeks democracy, the Romans large-scale government, the Hebrews a single god and a system of morals, and the Christians a spirituality based on redemption and grounded in a vast international church. The Roman Empire fell and the Dark Ages descended, until the arrival of the Renaissance, then the Age if Science and the Enlightenment, colonialism, the romantic era, modernity, and perhaps something we now call the postmodern age. In this sketchy account, humanity passes civilization down the centuries like a baton in a relay race…. This account remains, up the present, the essential background to all discussions of western culture, even for those who dispute it. Critics may argue with this or that part of it, or rewrite bits of it: still, the master narrative remains, because we have not concocted a credible substitute.”

Robert Fulford The Triumph of Narrative

“As modern words are actually used, there is hardly a shade of difference left between meaning well and meaning nothing.”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly October 25, 1934, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 1922 [and if you’re thinking wow, someone who could describe current conditions so exactly nearly a hundred years ago must have understood the underlying processes at work very well, I couldn’t agree more].