Quote of the Day (James Joyce, With an Irish View of ‘Revolutions in the World’)

“The movements which work revolutions in the world are born out of the dreams and visions in a peasant's heart on the hillside.” —Irish novelist James Joyce (1882-1941), Ulysses (1922)

Quote of the Day (George Bernard Shaw, on the Reasonable and the Unreasonable Man)

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”—Anglo-Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Quote of the Day (G.K. Chesterton, on Revolutions)

“How quickly revolutions grow old; and, worse still, respectable.”—G.K. Chesterton, in “The Listener,” March 6, 1935.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton, born on this date in 1874, was a really big guy. The way I figure it, he almost had to be, in order to take in his multiple literary guises. I first came to know this British man of letters in adolescence as the creator of the Father Brown detective stories, but in time I came to enjoy him even more as critic, novelist, poet, journalist, essayist, and, most of all, writer of Christian apologetics (and Catholic convert) whose influence in the last century might be exceeded only by C.S. Lewis.

As the above quote indicates, he was particularly the master of the playful paradox. That is the quality that informs virtually all his work, no matter the genre—and why he continues to make fans to this day.