“She was a woman of few words, but often.”
“Prochnow” quoted in “Other Suspects – III Quotes not by GKC” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025)
“Perhaps, the new intellectual world was really inaugurated when Oscar Wilde said about Bernard Shaw: ‘He has no enemies; but he is intensely disliked by all his friends.’”
G.K. Chesterton in “Peculiar Peace-Makers” in The New York American March 25, 1933, reprinted in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #2 (Nov./Dec. 2024)
On the 9th Hour podcast I joined theatre artist Breanna Doyle and host Charley to discuss heroes and villains in history, finding truth among shifting interpretations, and what it means for us today.
“As the myth of inevitable victory fragmented, the fragments became new, even larger, even brighter, myths. In a prolific spasm, illusion gave birth to a host of illusions. Horror was turned into spiritual fulfillment. War became peace. Death, life. Annihilation, freedom. Machine, poetry. Amorality, truth. Over eighteen thousand church bells and innumerable organ pipes were donated to the war effort, to be melted down and used for arms and ammunition. As the assault on the physical and social fixities of the nineteenth-century bourgeois world was intensified the resulting sensation was one of growing liberation from constraint, frontiers, forms. The promotion of this liberation continue to be the most important component of Pflicht. This association of death with life was a re-enactment, writ large, of the sacrificial sequence of Le Sacre du Printemps.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
In my latest National Post column I ponder the gulf between the economic deregulation Canada needs and the inexplicably popular wordy but vacuous dirigisme of the Carney administration.
“The Flat-Earthers may come into fashion, as promising leaders of the march of progress. Their party is small, perverse, unpopular, and probably wrong; and that seems to be all that is required to make a modern minority promising and progressive.”
G.K. Chesterton in Everyweek September 26, 1918, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025)
“fools are more dangerous than rogues”
Bernard Shaw The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism
In my latest Loonie Politics column I denounce the Canadian habit of putting up with meaningless rhetoric from politicians with nonsensical jobs.