“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)
“In the enthusiasm of its discoveries the Higher Criticism has applied to the New Testament tests of authenticity so severe that by them a hundred ancient worthies – e.g., Hammurabi, David, Socrates – would fade into legend. Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that mere inventors would have concealed – the competition of the apostles for high places in the Kingdom, their flight after Jesus’ arrest, Peter’s denial, the failure of Christ to work miracles in Galilee, the references of some auditors to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as to his mission, his confessions of ignorance as to the future, his moments of bitterness, his despairing cry on the cross; no one reading these scenes can doubt the reality of the figure behind them. That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels. After two centuries of Higher Criticism the outlines of the life, character, and teaching of Christ, remain reasonably clear, and constitute the most fascinating feature in the history of Western man.”
Will Durant Caesar and Christ
“There’s an old saying, ‘Choose your enemies wisely; you become like them.’”
Randall Smith in The Catholic Thing April 1, 2025
“Yet, while former [First World War] soldiers suffered from a high incidence of neurasthenia and sexual impotence, they realized that the war, in the words of Josée Germaine, was ‘the quivering axis of all human history.’ If the war as a whole had no objective meaning, then invariably all human history was telescoped into each man's experience; every person was the sum total of history. Rather than being a social experience, a matter of documentable reality, history was individual nightmare, or even, as the Dadaists insisted, madness. One is again reminded of Nietzsche’s statement, on the very edge of his complete mental collapse, that he was ‘every name in history.’”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“What is the matter with internationalism is that it is imperialism. It is the imposition of one ideal of one sect on the vital varieties of men. But it is worse than the imposition of ideals. It is actually the imposition of indifference.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News June 17, 1922, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #5 (May/June 2024)
“To pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of life is the only real aim of education; and closest to the child comes the woman – she understands. To say what she understands is beyond me; save only this, that it is not a solemnity. Rather it is a towering levity, an uproarious amateurishness of the universe, such as we felt when we were little, and would as soon sing as garden, as soon paint as run…. This is that insanely frivolous thing we call sanity. And the elegant female, drooping her ringlets over her water-colors, knew it and acted on it. She was juggling with frantic and flaming suns. She was maintaining the bold equilibrium of inferiorities which is the most mysterious of superiorities and perhaps the most unattainable. She was maintaining the prime truth of woman, the universal mother: that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”
G.K. Chesterton What’s Wrong with the World
“In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic; now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician.”
G.K. Chesterton, as header quotation on inaugural column by Brent Forrest, who was a professional magician, not further attributed, in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)
“It is impossible to caricature that which caricatures itself.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Dec. 16, quoted in “Can’t You Take A Joke?” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)