In my latest Epoch Times column I parse modern efforts to hide what we celebrate on Dec. 25 behind “Season” and “Winter” greetings, lights and other obvious clues.
“We never let a quarrel interrupt a good argument.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted as header quotation by Chris Chan in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)
“Fifteen minutes a day devoted to self-improvement, will be felt at the end of the year.”
Samuel Smiles Self-Help
“trying to say (at the same time) that God does not exist, and that He ought to be ashamed of existing, or possibly that he ought to be ashamed of not existing; an artistic effect that depends on belief. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The End of the Moderns,” in The Common Man and “Introductory Remarks,” in Heretics in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 6 #1 (Sept. 2002)
"Re the legally blind, how many illegally blind people are there?"
Another of mine, from September 6, 1999
“Experience, which destroys innocence, also leads one back to it.”
James Baldwin, quoted in Jon Winokur Zen to Go
“It is one of the most interesting principles of ancient and modern warfare (one of the few reliable laws of history) that ‘the nation which commands the sea is also the nation which commands the land.’ So far this law has never failed to work, but the modern airplane may have changed it.”
Hendrik Van Loon The Story of Mankind
“We are oppressed today. Not by the most antiquated traditions, but actually by the most recent fashions.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness January 2, 1920, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #5 (May/June 2022)