“Discipline will take you places that motivation can’t...”

Slogan I first saw on a T-shirt at Douvris Martial Arts that is widely cited online without definitive or even plausible initial attribution

“There is one aspect of the idea of human equality which is almost entirely ignored in the modern world. In fact it is flatly contradicted in the modern world. We hear quite enough perhaps of the essential identity of men in all varieties of place. We hear almost nothing of the essential identity of men in all varieties of time. Yet it is just as indispensable a part of the democratic sentiment to feel at one with men in other periods as to feel at one with men in other lands. The man who despises the dark races is despising Man. The man who despises the Dark Ages is also despising Man.”

G.K. Chesterton in Daily News Jan. 12, 1906, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)

“Atlas Shrugged makes no sense to me: the good people I know [rich or poor] are not stingy with their skills and expertise or whatever contributions they can make – whether prayer, money, or time – toward the common good. I know this as a fact. It is the characters in Atlas Shrugged who opt out (sometimes with much hand wringing) who are by definition the second rate. From knowing so many good people, I knew Atlas Shrugged was bunk. But I was wrong – in an oblique way this book was prophetic, but it was not Atlas who had shrugged; the world sitting on Atlas’s shoulders decided to jump off. Two years ago in Canada, every institution in Canadian society rejected the help of their many dedicated volunteers, and outlawed public participation in clubs, amateur sports, education, and religious observance. Any gatherings of five or more were prohibited, even in our homes. Christmas and Easter were cancelled. Sunday Mass was cancelled. Religious services were outlawed; whereas liquor stores, pot shops, big box stores, and professional sports were all kept open. The lines of demarcation were obvious, if it freely benefited families, helped the elderly, or made life better for people it was cancelled. Youth curling? Gone. House league hockey? Gone. Public arenas? Locked. Public pools? Public parks? Public walking trails? Shut down, access blocked with padlocks and chains, patrolled by the police. People, including children, who dared ride a bike, skate on a patch of ice, slide down a hill on cardboard or skateboard in an empty parking lot were fined, sometimes pushed violently to the ground, and often arrested. Funerals, weddings, baptisms, first communions – these were outlawed. All of our social, religious, and media institutions collaborated. A few Christian congregations resisted and their pastors were arrested, sometime just for reading the Bible outdoors. The City of Toronto (among others) opened up snitch lines so people could report anyone who celebrated Christmas or Easter. Those who questioned even the more extreme capitulations to dictatorship were pilloried in the press for being anti-science. However, there were still children to raise, people who needed encouraging, teen-agers who needed to learn and play, swim, and play music. Spontaneously, without any central organization, house league hockey was re-started by invitation only, on frozen ponds and rinks behind barns and hedges away from the searching eyes of both officialdom and vindictive neighbors. At our home we raised the height of the fence so people could not see into our yard from the road, which allowed us to host Euchre tournaments, and Christmas feasts, live music events, with visitors parking behind a large woodpile away from view. Everywhere, priests said Mass in private homes with time-and-place communicated by word of mouth to those who could be trusted to keep quiet.”

David Beresford in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)

“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)

“He who does his best, however little, is always to be distinguished from him who does nothing.”

Samuel Johnson in Rambler 177, according to D.J. Enright’s introduction to Johnson’s The History of Rasselas

“Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”

T.S. Eliot according to https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/101806-half-the-harm-that-is-done-in-this-world-is [part of it was emailed by a friend but whenever possible I do try to check]

“To call this a tendentious reading is to pour more soup than the bowl can hold. Mischievous or adolescent seem a little nearer the mark.”

Rex Murphy in Globe & Mail April 7, 2007 [re a Samson-as-suicide bomber version of Handel’s oratorio]

The historical approach to English Literature “has been destroyed at Cambridge and is now being destroyed at Oxford too. This is done by a compact, well-organized group of whom [F.R.] Leavis is the head. It now has a stranglehold on the schools as well as the universities (and the High Brow press). It is too open and avowed to be called a plot. It is much more like a political party – or Inquisition. Leavis himself is something (in the long run) more fatal than a villain. He is a perfectly sincere, disinterested, fearless, ruthless fanatic. I am sure he would, if necessary, die for his critical principles: I am afraid he might also kill for them. Ultimately, a pathological type – unhappy, intense, mirthless. Incapable of conversation: dead silence or prolonged, passionate, and often irrelevant, monologue are his only two lines.”

A letter from C.S. Lewis to J.B. Priestley on September 18, 1962, quoted in Harry Lee Poe The Completion of C.S. Lewis