“It was not the slavers who would end up settling Africa, and subjugating it to foreign rule, but – by an irony familiar from Christian history – the emancipators.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“Politics are now so corrupt that everything they touch is corrupted. We are long past the point of protecting our government from the degrading influences of trade or professionalism. If anything, we have to protect our trades and professions from the degrading influences of government.”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness November 5, 1920, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024) [and I need hardly add that we did not and it has therefore gotten far worse in the intervening century]
“The bungles, delays and disaster associated with space travel indicate that the people concerned with it may, indeed, be exercising creative incompetence. I emphasize ‘may’ because the test of real creative incompetence is that an observer cannot certainly tell whether the incompetence is deliberate or not.”
Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, The Peter Principle
“If you love your job, you will never work another day in your life.”
Implausibly attributed to Confucius in “More Choice Quotes” in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 5 #7 (May 2002) [evidently a version has also been attributed to Mark Twain, rather less unbelievably: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/646569-find-a-job-you-enjoy-doing-and-you-will-never
“The whole book, indeed, is a picture of the Tree of Life – a sappy and golden book, full of buoyancy and confidence. We cannot, I admit, appropriate all its confidence today. We cannot point to the high virtue of Christian living and the gay, almost mocking courage of Christian martyrdom, as a proof of our doctrines with quite that assurance with Athanasius takes as a matter of course. But whoever may be to blame for that, it is not Athanasius.”
C.S. Lewis’s 1944 “Preface from the First Edition” in John Behr’s translation of Saint Athanasius On the Incarnation
“At a repast given in 63 [AD - he’s describing the increasingly high living as the Roman Republic fell apart] by a high priest, and attended incongruously by Vestal Virgins and Caesar, the hors d’oeuvres consisted of mussels, spondyles, fieldfares with asparagus, fattened fowls, oyster pastries, sea nettles, ribs of roe, purple shellfish, and songbirds. Then came the dinner – sows’ udders, boars head, fish, duck, teals, hares, fowl, pastries, and sweets.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ [and I was going along salivating pretty happily until we got to the udders]
“‘Realistic’ books are generally written from one or both of two very vile motives; the more pardonable is an ugly itch to excite our appetites, the much less pardonable is an ugly itch to depress our spirits.”
G.K. Chesterton in Daily News April 27, 1912, quoted in “The Ugly” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)
“That history bore witness to a war between light and darkness, aeons old, and demanding from those on the side of good an unstinting watchfulness against evil, was a conviction that Tolkien shared with the Nazis. Admittedly, when articulating the mission of National Socialism, its leaders tended not to frame it in such terms. They preferred the language of Darwinism. ‘A cool doctrine of reality based on the most incisive scientific knowledge and its theoretical elucidation.’ So Hitler had defined National Socialism, a year before invading Poland and engulfing Europe in a second terrible civil war.”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World