“A million kids want to clean up the earth. A million parents want them to start with their rooms.”
Emailed by a friend without attribution
“To pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of life is the only real aim of education; and closest to the child comes the woman – she understands. To say what she understands is beyond me; save only this, that it is not a solemnity. Rather it is a towering levity, an uproarious amateurishness of the universe, such as we felt when we were little, and would as soon sing as garden, as soon paint as run…. This is that insanely frivolous thing we call sanity. And the elegant female, drooping her ringlets over her water-colors, knew it and acted on it. She was juggling with frantic and flaming suns. She was maintaining the bold equilibrium of inferiorities which is the most mysterious of superiorities and perhaps the most unattainable. She was maintaining the prime truth of woman, the universal mother: that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”
G.K. Chesterton What’s Wrong with the World
In my latest Epoch Times column I say the idea of putting warning labels on booze is as silly as putting them on lions, and worse.
“Anything worth doing is worth doing badly – at first.”
Dick Karpinski, quoted in Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems
“In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic; now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician.”
G.K. Chesterton, as header quotation on inaugural column by Brent Forrest, who was a professional magician, not further attributed, in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)
“It is impossible to caricature that which caricatures itself.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Dec. 16, quoted in “Can’t You Take A Joke?” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
“Before you believe what the press says, find out who pays for the ink.”
Emailed by a friend without attribution
“Her [Rome’s] language became, by a most admirable corruption, the speech of Italy, Rumania, France, Spain, Portugal, and Latin America; half the white man’s world speaks a Latin tongue. Latin was, till the 18th century, the Esperanto of science, scholarship, and philosophy in the West; it gave a convenient international terminology to botany and zoology; it survives in the sonorous ritual and official documents of the Roman Church; it still writes medical prescriptions, and haunts the phraseology of the law. It entered by direct appropriation, and again through the romance languages (regalis, regal, royal; paganus, pagan, peasant), to enhance the wealth and flexibility of English speech. Our Roman heritage works in our lives a thousand times a day.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ