“Wisdom is a virtue, not a talent, and so it is not the same as mere intelligence.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” May 8, 2023 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/things-i-had-to-learn]
“it must be said that since the birth of the most famous of analysts, Prince Hamlet, analysis, as the supreme quality of a character, is never divorced from Hamletism. That is, an intellect that dominates everything is a source of softening of the will and indecisiveness in action. With Martov, who was a thinking apparatus par excellence, the centers of restraint were too strong to allow him the free and reckless acts of combat, the revolutionary feats that no longer demand the reason, but only the will.”
Nikolai N. Sukhanov The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal record by N.N. Sukhanov
“If discretion in personal diet is not among the liberties of a citizen, what is?”
G.K. Chesterton in New Witness Nov. 11, 1916, quoted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 #5 (May-June 2023)
“But blind stupidity is not one of the virtues…”
Dr. Bocker in John Wyndham The Kraken Wakes
“Recall the recipe for unicorn stew: first, get a unicorn.”
Richard John Neuhaus in First Things #146 October 2004 [ridiculing Robert Reich’s formula for liberal electoral victory in the U.S.]
“We have been accused of hostility to the scientist, when we are merely hostile to the materialist.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News May 9, 1931, quoted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 March-April 2022
“men dying in agonies to find a place [the North Pole] where no man can live – a place only interesting because it is supposed to be the meeting-place of some lines that do not exist.”
G.K. Chesterton in Heretics, quoted by Mary DeMarco in Gilbert! magazine Vol. 4 #1 (September 2000) [about how we laugh at men who died looking for Christ’s tomb but celebrate those who died looking for the North Pole].
“The fact that I suppress what I know and pretend not to know it, even though I do know it, does not keep my buried knowledge from influencing my actions – but, since I suppress it, it distorts my thinking and influences my actions in a perverse way.”
J. Budziszewski “The Underground Thomist” May 8, 2023 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/things-i-had-to-learn