“A real spiritual abyss only opens when men appear to us to be boasting of bad actions; and this is true of nearly all that modern politicians and philanthropists boast of as their good actions. Social idealism is often actually Satanic; in the quite cold and rational sense that it claims to be the creator. To start the opposite ideal, of creatures being creative, or rather procreative, by a direct authority from the Creator, is not only a difficulty but a risk. It involves the probability of some abuse of freedom in practice. When the abuse is abominable, the true function of Government reappears; which is to exclude extreme abominations.”

G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly Nov. 1, 1934, quoted in “The Bad” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #1 (September-October 2024)

“Gilbert’s history of man’s story [G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man] has the life of Jesus as the focal point of the world, the ‘crisis of history.’ The development of the Roman Catholic Church is the guiding line throughout history, a guide by which we can judge progress and advancement. Science has no place here, other than as a by-product of the spiritual centre, and man is no more near perfection in 1920 then he was in 1290. There has always been a path to heaven, and a road to somewhere else.”

Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton

“In the end, he [G.K. Chesterton] says, the exaggeration of sex becomes sexlessness. We are no longer drawn to the bait on the hook. We are drawn to the hook itself.”

Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say all the excitement about Zohran Mamdani is misplaced, not because he isn’t potentially important but because what matters isn’t whether he wins a primary or even the New York general mayoral election. It’s what happens if and when he tries to govern and what the result tells us about the soundness or insanity of his principles.

“Weak if we were and foolish/ Not thus we failed, not thus;/ When that black Baal blocked the heavens/ He had no hymns from us.”

The introductory poem in G.K Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday, quoted in Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton

“Indeed, I think it [the turn to autocracy or worse because of the failings of democracy especially under “the Party System”] is part of the one big blunder that is at the back of all our blunders. It is hard to put it shortly, except by calling it the blunder of being Practical. Perhaps the nearest word is Opportunism; but it is not the sane opportunism that takes all opportunities to advance a great thing; it is the nervy and panicky opportunism that accepts all the small things because they have more opportunities. It is this yielding to the apparently practical that has ruined everything.”

G.K. Chesterton “The True Fascist Fallacy” reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)

“God is not a path to fulfillment, He is fulfillment. C.S. Lewis, a devotee of Gilbert’s, was to say that if God was seen as a road, he was not seen at all.”

Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton [summing up the orthodox view in context of the young GKC’s struggles]

“I go slap through a roomful of MSS., criticizing deuced conscientiously, with the result that I post back some years of MSS. to addresses, which I should imagine, must be private asylums.”

G.K. Chesterton writing to E.C. Bentley (the Clerihew guy) in 1895 describing his workday and the various tasks he undertakes for a publishing house, Redway, including clearing a backlog of manuscripts, quoted in Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton