“What we ought to consider is this: not that certain ideals are impossible, but that they are undesirable.”
G.K. Chesterton in “A Critic in Utopia” in Middlesex Gazette December 22, 1906, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)
In my latest Epoch Times column I mocked progressive alarm at Jordan Peterson daring to interview Pierre Poilievre, and at either man daring to exist. But I then expressed my own alarm at the way Poilievre makes plausibly right-wing noises without articulating genuine policy alternatives on major issues.
“We relax at the ranch [in California] which, if not heaven itself, probably has the same zip code.”
Ronald Reagan in a 40th wedding anniversary tribute to his wife Nancy in 1992, quoted in National Post June 7, 2004
“Go back to the idea of government by ideas.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Revolt Against Ideas,” in The Thing, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 10 #6 (4-5/07)
“It’s hard to imagine how the human race could have survived if women had been as antisocial and unfriendly and unpleasant as men can be, and as the most creative men often are.”
Anthony Esolen in No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men, quoted in a review by Chuck Chalberg in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022)
“Many even of the sexual anarchists are already weary of the sexual anarchy, and are groping towards a more respectable relation. But they are groping for it rather than grasping it; because their previous prejudice had been all to the effect that respectability must never be respected.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly July 12, 1935, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)
“‘There is no nation so atheistic that it does not attribute a sanctity to two gods, the dead man and the woman in travail.’”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted by Fr. James V. Schall. S.J. in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #1 (Sept. 04) [apparently originally in “The Mystery of Patriotism” in The Commonwealth Jan. 19, 1902]
“Modern men are less anxious to be men than to be moderns.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly December 26, 1935, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)