“Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.” GKC
Tag: #oldbooks
OLD BOOKS, Part IV: On Moral Fiction, by John Gardner
“[W]e begin to praise writers themselves for their oddity, not for their wisdom, universality, or even art.”
OLD BOOKS, Part I: The Captive Mind, by Czeslaw Milosz
“Still we lived; and since we were writers, we tried to write. True, from time to time one of us dropped out, shipped off to a concentration camp or shot. There was no help for this. We were like people marooned on a dissolving floe of ice; we dared not think of the moment when it would melt away.”
OLD BOOKS – Intro
“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.” G. K. Chesterton