“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)

“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

“The reasonable people (for I know some quite reasonable people who allow me to talk to them), the rationalists, the liberal progressive people all say, ‘The Indian need is Independence; it must be a self-governing unit,’ and so on. Then they both say, ‘Let us hope no silly squabbles about religion will spoil this great unity,’ whether Imperial or National. Now I am so perverse that I think the religious squabbles are much less silly than the political squabbles. I am much more certain that there is such a thing as Islam than there is such a thing as India. I believe much more in the existence of a Hindoo than in the existence of an Indian. And I think the difficulties do arise from the doctrines; but much more from the trick of ignoring the doctrines.”

G.K. Chesterton in “The Thing They Left Out” in the New York American January 9, 1932 reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

James “Madison was the Father of the Constitution, Architect of the Bill of Rights, and the only Secretary of State never to have left the country. The oldest of 12 children, he could read and write in seven languages. He attended the College of New Jersey (which became Princeton) instead of William and Mary – where Jefferson went and got all those Scottish Enlightenment Ideas.”

Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)

In my latest Epoch Times column I urge people to put aside small-minded, defeatist, timid claims that practically speaking Canada can only have the bad muddled policies it currently does, and write down what they really think is wrong and what they really think would fix it.

“The modern laxity of language has had a great deal to do with the ultimate laxity of conduct.”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly July 4, 1931 quoted in “More About Language” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)

“the type of modern idealism is a very narrow type. As Stevenson said, modern civilisation is ‘a dingy, ungentlemanly business. It leaves so much out of a man.’ In the old romances it was the villain that was monotonous. In the old melodramas it was the villain who always looked the same. His black moustache, eyeglass, and cigarette, were a sort of uniform of the infernal service. But the good men were of all conceivable shapes and colours – and some rather inconceivable. Don Quixote was a good man, and starved himself; Mr. Pickwick was a good man, and did not object to milk punch; Sam Weller was a good man, and did not object to pretty housemaids; the Master of Ravenswood was a good man and got drowned; Sidney Carton was a good man and got drunk; Benedick is a good man in Much Ado About Nothing; and so is the Friar in Romeo and Juliet. The old masters maintain the gayest miscellaneousness in good men by having one black stick to represent bad men. It was like the patches that their ladies put upon their complexions. That one black spot threw up and set free all the changing colours and contours of real health. But to-day we are drifting to the opposite extreme. We are getting only one kind of good man – one who approves of international peace, one who is quite in favour of social reform, one who thinks there should be a minimum wage, but also a court of arbitration – enough, you know him. And we have got around us, on the other hand, every antic and extravagance of the evil man; varieties which none of the old romancers could have conceived, or would have been permitted to describe. I confess I prefer the old-time notice-boards warning men off particular precipices and swamps in what is in other respects a rolling and romantic land of liberty.”

G.K. Chesterton in The Eye Witness March 7, 1912 reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #1 (Sept.-Oct. 2023)