for X
Do you, I wonder, little children, who read this story? Or are you like the boy in the kindergarten to whom I was telling a fairy story and who interrupted me contemptuously with the remark: "Fairies don't exist!" "O don't they my little man!" said I. "Well you think so." Presently we read of a ball that grew, and he spoke again with great energy:
... See moreMargaret Arndt • Fairy Tales from the German Forests
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
It is chiefly interesting as evidence that the boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary.
G K. Chesterton • The Everlasting Man (with linked TOC)
The point is, that the poor in London are not left alone, but rather deafened and bewildered with raucous and despotic advice. They are not like sheep without a shepherd. They are more like one sheep whom twenty-seven shepherds are shouting at. All the newspapers, all the new advertisements, all the new medicines and new theologies, all the glare
... See moreG. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton • What's Wrong with the World
Is disinformation/misinformation really a new problem?
Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day
“There was always hope that in talk, talk, talk he could alter the past, conjure the future, and impose an estimable image of himself upon the present.”
By the accident of my present detachment, I can see the inevitable smash of the philosophies of Schopenhauer and Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Shaw, as clearly as an inevitable railway smash could be seen from a balloon. They are all on the road to the emptiness of the asylum. For madness may be defined as using mental activity so as to reach mental
... See moreG. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton • Orthodoxy
Will is the rejection of almost everything — similar to how a painter has to choose the frame and borders and subject
But I do say, to start with, “What can we do for posterity, except deal fairly with our contemporaries?” Unless a man love his wife whom he has seen, how shall he love his child whom he has not seen?
G. K. Chesterton • The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]
Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day
“Life is a series of disappoints, of promises that come to nothing”
I cannot understand any democrat not seeing the danger of so distant and indirect a system of government. It is hard enough anywhere to get representatives to represent. It is hard enough to get a little town council to fulfil the wishes of a little town, even when the townsmen meet the town councillors every day in the street, and could kick them
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