“I am not absent-minded. It is the presence of the mind that makes me unaware of everything else.”
G.K. Chesterton, quoted as “Thought du jour” in Globe & Mail March 27, 2001
“Theological distinctions are fine but not thin. In all the mess of modern thoughtlessness that still calls itself modern thought, there is perhaps nothing so stupendously stupid as the common saying, ‘Religion can never depend on minute disputes about doctrine.’ It is like saying that life can never depend on minute disputes about medicine. The man who is content to say, ‘We do not want theologians splitting hairs’ will doubtless be content to go on and say, ‘We do not want surgeons splitting filaments more delicate than hairs.’ It is the fact that many a man would be dead today, if his doctors had not debated fine shades about doctoring. It is also the fact that European civilization would be dead today, if its doctors of divinity had not debated fine shades about doctrine.”
G.K. Chesterton in “The Story of the Statues” in The Resurrection of Rome, quoted in “Chesterton’s Mail Bag” in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 11 #3 (Nov.-Dec. 2007)
“In plain words, imaginative poetry must not appeal to the sense of sound. The futurist poet is like the Early Victorian child. He must be seen and not heard.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News August 25, 1928 quoted in “The Book of the Prophet Daniel” in “GKC on Scripture * Conducted by Peter Floriani” in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)
“Satire depends on sanity, and on contrast with insanity; that is why there is very little satire left.”
G.K. Chesterton in G.K.’s Weekly July 16, 1927 quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)
In my opening remarks to the 2024 Economic Education Association of Alberta “Freedom Talk” on “The Decline of Western Civilization: Our Fate or Our Choice?” in Red Deer, I said the fight to save Western civilization is fought first and foremost on the field of ideas.
In my closing remarks to the 2024 Economic Education Association of Alberta “Freedom Talk” conference in Red Deer on “The Decline of Western Civilization: Our Fate or Our Choice?” I urged people to go forth with joyful hope.
“The truth of religion comes from its symbolic rendering of man’s moral experience; it proceeds intuitively and imaginatively. Its falsehood comes from its attempt to substitute itself for science and to pretend that its poetic statements are information about reality.”
Eugene Genovese Roll Jordan Roll [before he became a Christian, obviously].
“THE DEBATE ABOUT NEW FORMS IN ART INTERESTS ME, because my reaction to it is not that of the ordinary reactionary. The first fact I feel is that all this faith in novelty is the very reverse of novel. It is also the very reverse of original. It has now been a convention for more than a century and a half; and it was originally borrowed from the stale and vulgar world of party politics. It is from the old wrangles of Rads and Reformers and True Blue Tories that modern art has borrowed this queer notion of incessant Progress and each generation crowing over the last. When I read all this confident exposition about new methods that must now supersede old methods; of how Yeats and Swinburne must yield to Mr. Eliot and Mr. Pound, just as Tennyson and Browning had to yield to Yeats and Swinburne, I heave a sigh that is full of old and tender memories. I do not feel as if I were reading some revolutionary proclamation of new anarchic hopes or ideals: I feel as if I were reading Macaulay’s Essays.”
G.K. Chesterton in “Novelty in Art” in Illustrated London News Oct. 6, 1928, reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 6 (July-August 2023)