“‘Read biography,’ said Disraeli, ‘for that is life without theory.’”
John O’Sullivan in National Review December 8, 1997
“When the Puritans say they are democrats, they mean that they really have a universal desire to prevent ordinary people from doing ordinary things.”
G.K. Chesterton in English Life March 1924, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #3 (1/2/2022)
In my latest Epoch Times column I warn aspiring politicians, and voters, that the biggest problem with government is that the people who undertake it make no effort to learn how it works until it’s far too late.
“hate is always the result of a feeling of impotence.”
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in National Review January 22, 1990
“The world is run by those who show up.”
Bruce Vincent (a friend of his) quoted by William Perry Pendley, President and CEO of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, in a speech January 21, 1993 in Vancouver
“There is, however, another good work that is done by detective stories. While it is the constant tendency of the Old Adam to rebel against so universal and automatic a thing as civilization, to preach departure and rebellion, the romance of police activity keeps in some sense before the mind the fact that civilization itself is the most sensational of departures and the most romantic of rebellions. By dealing with the unsleeping sentinels who guard the outposts of society, it tends to remind us that we live in an armed camp, making war with a chaotic world, and that the criminals, the children of chaos, are nothing but the traitors within our gates. When the detective in a police romance stands alone, and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves’ kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful knighterrancy. This form of art, like every form of art down to a comic song, has the whole truth of the universe behind it.”
G.K. Chesterton in “In Defence of Detective Stories” in The Defendant, quoted by Fr. Robert Wild in a piece on Catherine Doherty in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 #6 (July/August 2022)
“I began listening more carefully to what my father had to say after the Churchill speech, for my father was clear in his own mind about where his loyalties lay. Having known persecution in Poland [he was Jewish], having served with his brothers in the British Army during the First World War, and having been a fierce patriot in his land of adoption, my father was an outspoken advocate of British freedom. ‘This is the one place where people are still free,’ he would tell me. ‘If you have to choose between giving in and fighting, fight; just remember that. Fight with everything you’ve got.’”
Jack Maurice Nissen Winning the Radar War
In my latest Loonie Politics column I note the ominous apparent paradox in which as the federal government spends and hires ever more recklessly, the national police force totally fails to attend to its core duty of protecting that government and its citizens from subversion, espionage and so on.