“If hard work is the key to success, most people would rather pick the lock.”
D.P. Diffiné, “The 1993 American Incentive System Almanac”.
“Like Nietzsche, the Islamic state saw in the pieties of western civilization – its concern for the suffering, its prating about human rights – a source of terrible and sickly power. Like [the Marquis de] Sade, they understood that the surest blow they could strike against it was a display of exultant and unapologetic cruelty. The cross had to be redeemed from Christianity. In the Qur’an it served as it had served under the Caesars: as an emblem of righteously sanctioned punishment. ‘The penalty for those who wage war against God and his messenger, and to strive in fomenting corruption on the earth, is that they be killed or crucified...’”
Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
“A proverb is a short sentence based on long experience.”
“Cervantes” 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)
“Birth Control is an oily optimistic euphemism for something totally different; as if we were to call assassination or massacre Life-Control.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted by Dale Ahlquist in “Chesterton University” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #2 (Nov./Dec. 2024)
“Dorgelès called the [World War I] trenches ‘this huge confessional’”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“Why does the perfect social state always seem to be a state of perfect boredom stiffened only by self-righteousness?”
G.K. Chesterton in London Magazine August 1924, quoted in “Why Do You Ask Me Rhetorical Questions? 6” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
“You should be more afraid of a stupid man than of an evil one.”
Christina, Queen of Sweden (1626-1689) [emailed by a friend and quoted for instance at https://www.azquotes.com/quote/966702]
“He who would do some great thing in this short life must apply himself to work with such a concentration of his forces as, to idle spectators who live only to amuse themselves, looks like insanity.”
“Francis Parkman (1823-93)” quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail July 19, 2002