“Clearness is the first essential”.
Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria according to Will Durant Caesar and Christ [though entering it I would prefer “Clarity”]
“Work is the rent you pay for the room you occupy on Earth”
One of the late Queen Mother’s sayings, much quoted in the royal family, according to the Ottawa Citizen July 1, 1999
“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Oct. 23, 1909, quoted in “Evil and Other Evils” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #6 (July-August 2024)
“I run like the winded.”
Emailed by a friend without attribution
“Theoretically, I suppose, everyone would like to be freed from worries. But nobody in the world would always like to be freed from worrying occupations. … The truth is the other way. If we are not interested, why on earth should we be worried? Women are worried about housekeeping, but those that are most interested are the most worried. Women are still more worried about their husbands and their children. And I suppose if we strangled the children and poleaxed the husbands it would leave women free for higher culture. That is, it would leave them free to begin to worry about that. For women would worry about higher culture as much as they worry about everything else.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted without further attribution in Mark Pilon “News With Views” in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)
“There is no more remarkable psychological element in history than the way in which a period can suddenly become unintelligible... To the early Victorian period we have in a moment lost the key: the Crystal Palace is the temple of a forgotten creed. The thing always happens sharply...”
G.K. Chesterton’s 1904 biography of G.F. Watts, quoted in Michael Coren Gilbert: The Man Who Was G.K. Chesterton
In my latest Epoch Times column I say various judicial, academic and activist claims that the Canadian state does not exercise legitimate sovereignty over Canadian territory, including granting valid “fee simple” land titles, are a recipe for confusion, bitterness and disaster.
“Democracy as a failure is better than Dictatorship as a success.”
G.K. Chesterton quoted without further attribution by Dale Ahlquist in Gilbert! The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #4 (March/April 2024)