for X
It would be worse still if this short human life were broken up into yet shorter lives, each of which was in its turn forgotten.
G. K. Chesterton • The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]
Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day
“Life is surrounded by mysteries beyond the comprehension of our limited minds. You and I have seen them. We transmit (we hope) fairer things than we can fully grasp.”
The difficulty of believing in democracy is that it is so hard to believe—like God and most other good things.
G. K. Chesterton • The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]
A man does not want his national home destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all the good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt down, because he can hardly count all the things he would miss. Therefore he fights for what sounds like a hazy abstraction, but is really a house.
G K. Chesterton • The Everlasting Man (with linked TOC)
Nationalism
Dickens, The Curiosity Shop
“We are all going to the play, or coming home from it”
Accurate description of Twitter, using crows and a graveyard (dickens, curiosity shop)
Men merely finding themselves free found themselves free to dispute the value of freedom.
G. K. Chesterton • The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]
Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day
“I don’t have any original thoughts. I just have the thoughts that millions of people have when they look at the sea or the stars.”
The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a king. This is the only way in which truth can ever find refuge from public persecution, and the good man survive the bad government.