“Clearness is the first essential”.
Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria according to Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ is a question about work. What is your work in the world going to be? What will be your works? These are not fundamentally questions about jobs and pay, but questions about life…. Work in this fundamental sense is not what we do for a living but what we do with our living.”
Introduction to the chapter on Work in William Bennett The Book of Virtues
“Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars. His instincts and imagination can still connect them, when his reason can no longer see the need of the connection; for him there will always be some savour of religion about the mere picture of a mother and a baby; some hint of mercy and softening about the mere mention of the dreadful name of God.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The God in the Cave” in The Everlasting Man, quoted in “The Name of God” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)
“BORN TO BE WILD BUT ONLY UNTIL 9PM”
Image of a coffee mug emailed by a friend without attribution but under the heading “AGE”
“From the sublime to the ridiculous in a single step.”
Napoleon “with a shrug as he departed Moscow and began the famous retreat after the Russians burned their capital under him”, quoted in Conrad Black Rise to Greatness: The History of Canada from the Vikings to the Present
“Aside from these basic tenets, the followers of Christ, in the first three centuries, divided into a hundred creeds. We should misjudge the function of history – which is to illuminate the present through the past – were we to detail the varieties of religious belief that sought and failed to capture the growing church, and which the church had to brand, one after another, as disintegrating heresies.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
In my latest Epoch Times column I say Canadians have prepared for the government to borrow itself and us into insolvency by borrowing to the brink of bankruptcy themselves, while electing politicians as insouciant about debt as they are.
“But when it comes to a fight for private property – you can’t keep women out of that. You can’t have the family farm without the family. You must have Christian marriage again: you can’t have solid small property with all this vagabond polygamy.”
G.K. Chesterton in Tales of the Long Bow, as header quotation on David Beresford in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)