“To have no philosophy is to have a bad philosophy.”

Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis [quoting a letter around Christmas 1928 to his brother Warren (“Warnie”) in China in which Lewis insisted that the line was original with him].

“‘Like the land of the Brobdingnagians,’ said Turnbull, smiling. ‘Oh, Where is that?’ said MacIan. Turnbull said bitterly, ‘In a book,’ and the silence fell suddenly between them again.”

G.K. Chesterton The Ball and the Cross, as header quotation on David Beresford in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)

“If you think wrong, you go wrong.”

G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News September 12, 1914, quoted in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2008)

“the waters are always smoothest and even most polished when they pour over the precipice.”

G.K. Chesterton quoted by Dale Ahlquist in “Chesterton University” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022) [with particular reference to those topics on which polite society and the Establishment stifle debate]

“When the art of controversy comes back, it will not come from the world of sceptics and iconoclasts. It will come rather from the world of believers and of dogmatists. It will not be the work of men who merely ask questions, but of men who believe that they have found answers. It will come out of the clash of real convictions, which are positive and not negative; not from those who say: ‘What is truth,’ but from those who can still say: ‘This is truth’; not from Pilate but from Paul.”

G.K. Chesterton in New Witness Sept. 8, 1922, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 4 (March-April 2023)

In my latest National Post column I say the DND report on patriarchy invading the cosmos , while hilarious, reflects an pernicious ideology that destroys all productive enterprises from space exploration to defence procurement, and has wrecked governance in Canada.

“It will be a comfort to me all my life to know that the scientist and the materialist have not the last word: that Darwin and [Herbert] Spencer undermining ancestral beliefs stand themselves on a foundation of sand; of gigantic assumptions and irreconcilable contradictions an inch below the surface”.

C.S. Lewis to “Albert” on accepting an English fellowship and abandoning philosophy with some relief as relentlessly depressing skepticism, quoted in Harry Lee Poe The Making of C.S. Lewis

“Speaking fluently and clearly will be put at the heart of the national curriculum and given the same status as literacy and numeracy under a Labour government, Sir Keir Starmer has pledged. In an article for The Times the Labour leader says that the ‘almost exclusive’ focus on reading and writing at present is ‘short-sighted’ as he calls for oracy to be given priority at every level of a child’s education.”

The Times July 5, 2023 [the teaser referred to “oracy” and I went to scoff but stayed to listen]