Quotes from Dale Ahlquist

Materialism is really our established church; for the Government will really help it to persecute the heretics.

whenever he hears a man say that life is not worth living, he takes out the gun and offers to shoot him. "Always with the most satisfactory results", he laughs.

The moderns say that they are leaving the past, because it is exhausted; but they lie. They are escaping from the past because it is so strong.

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their common sense.

when I say that children should be taught to think I do not mean (like many moderns) that they should be taught to doubt; for the two processes are not only not the same, but are in many ways opposite. To doubt is only to destroy; to think is to create.

Chesterton says that thinking is the hardest work in the world. And hard work, he says, is repugnant to our nature.

The world we live in is a mess. It does no good to deny it. And it does no good to deny that G. K. Chesterton prophetically described the mess we are in. But he also described why it has happened, and he proposed solutions for cleaning it up.

Those who merely denounce intolerance seem to have no theory at all with which to defend toleration.

There are, he claims, two kinds of people in the world: those who are dogmatic and know it, and those who are dogmatic and don't know it.

can't remember the third! "In Defense of Rash Vows" was so appropriate. Susan and I had exchanged our marriage vows less than five months before. Chesterton wrote: "The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant time or place. The danger of it is that he may not keep the appointment.

All Christianity concentrates on the man at the cross-roads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philosophy is concerned with the instant. Will a man take this road or that?

Paradox is not just a logician's art. It is every man's tool to understand the real world we inhabit for a short time, and how it shapes our everlasting life. Paradox is a tool so common that a carpenter once used it to explain the depth of our existence.

In short, our journalists do not realise that the human race has any respect for coherency of mind. It is not strange that their world has also lost all respect for that other sort of coherency which was called integrity.

In his book on the saint, Chesterton says that, for Francis, religion was not a theory but a love affair, and "there are those who do not believe that a heavenly love can be as real as an earthly love.

living there. That, he says, is what happens to each of us on the day we are born. That is how we enter a family. In a family, we have to get along with a group of people we did not choose to live with, which happens to be the same situation in our relationship with the rest of the world: "The men and women who, for good reasons and bad, revolt against the family, are, for good reasons and bad, simply revolting against mankind.

There is the striking chapter on "The Five Deaths of the Faith" near the end of The Everlasting Man, arguably Chesterton's masterpiece, in which he declares that "Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.

wrong. . . .[Some] people merely take the modern mood . . . and then require any creed to be cut down to fit that mood. But

We are no longer very sophisticated thinkers or very precise thinkers. We deal in moods and emotions, especially in the arts, and we have developed a very loose vocabulary along with our loose thinking.

When Chesterton was asked why he became Catholic, he answered, "To get rid of my sins."8 He says that only the Catholic Church can do that, and that when a man steps out of the confessional, he is only five minutes old. His whole life has started over again.

We have reinforced this limited choice by putting socialism in our left hand and capitalism in our right hand, leaving no other hands. The

long before even Copernicus stated it, it had been suggested in the very middle of the Middle Ages by Cusa: and that the persecuting Church proceeded to persecute him by making him a Cardinal.

There is now a false idealism of turning Government into God, by a vague notion that it gives everything to everybody; to the denial of the liberty given by God, which is called life. . . .

The exception has become the rule, and that is the worst of all possible tyrannies.

An open mind is really a mark of foolishness, like an open mouth.3 The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.