“The important thing in life is not to keep a steady system of pleasure and composure (which can be done quite well by hardening one’s heart or thickening one’s head), but to keep alive in oneself the immortal power of astonishment and laughter, and a kind of young reverence.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Jan. 11, 1908, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)
“The world of the concentration camp and the atom bomb was etched with the patterns of a more distant age: one when the wings of angels had beaten close over battlefields, and miracles had been manifest on Middle Earth. There were few moments in the novel [The Lord of the Rings] when its profoundly Christian character were rendered overt; but when they came, they were made to count. The fall of Mordor, so Tolkien specified, occurred on 25 March: the very date on which, since at least the third century, Christ was believed to have become incarnate in the womb of Mary, and then to have been crucified.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“Government = a punchline without a joke.”
Comment by @mikeymike3760 on the Climate Discussion Nexus video “The Hottest Day Never” Oct. 16, 2024 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erBkSGvbZNs&lc=Ugw7r8cN9esgXuI-8HB4AaABAg].
“The critical thing in life is whether you take things for granted, or take them with gratitude. And gratitude is only happiness, doubled by wonder.”
A line from Dr. John Walker’s one-man G.K. Chesterton stage play (but I assume quoting GKC exactly) in Walker’s piece on doing that show in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)
“That human beings have rights; that they are born equal; that they are owed sustenance, and shelter, and refuge from persecution: these were never self-evident truths. The Nazis, certainly, knew as much – which is why, in today’s demonology, they retain their starring role. Communist dictators may have been no less murderous than fascist ones; but they – because communism was the expression of a concern for the oppressed masses – rarely seem as diabolical to people today. The measure of how Christian we as a society remain is that mass murder precipitated by racism tends to be seen as vastly more abhorrent than mass murder precipitated by an ambition to usher in a classless paradise. Liberals may not believe in hell; but they still believe in evil.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
In my latest Epoch Times column I say a massive issue confronting the Liberals that was not discussed during the election is the increasing incompetence of the state at basic tasks as well as grandiose ones.
“When Donald Trump was elected President of the United States in November 2016 an immediate reaction in the media, among Democrats and discomforted Republicans, and many besides, was that he should not be ‘normalized’. That such an ignorant, intemperate, corrupt buffoon was President was an enormity that was to the country’s shame and must be resisted. When Justin Trudeau became Prime Minister in November 2015 there was no such reaction in Canada. That a callow young man who had led a meandering life, who had never shown any interest in government, who was evidently both conceited and silly, should be Prime Minister simply because he had been famous since shortly after his conception, was nice looking, and was the son of a man who had been a bad Prime Minister for fifteen years over 30 years before, should sweep the country in the 2015 election was shameful. No one seems to have noticed.”
John Pepall in Dorchester Review #29 (Vol. 14 #3 Autumn 2024)
“People tend to hold overly favourable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across four studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability…”
Start of summary of the seminal paper by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1999 Vol. 7 # 6