"We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults."

We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one's life. But anyone who shrinks from this is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being. The pessimist of the ordinary type, the pessimist who thinks he would be better dead, is blasted with the crime of Iscariot. Spiritually speaking, we should be justified in punishing him with death. Only, out of polite deference to his own philosophy, we punish him with life.

-"What is Right With the World", T.P.'s Weekly (1910)
The Apostle and the Wild Ducks (collection of essays published posthumously in 1975) 

One of the greatest dangers of our time is that the name and power of philanthropy may be given to what are only the private tastes and whims of the genteel.

-September 7, 1907, Illustrated London News

...In his volume called Problems and Persons... [Wilfrid Ward] answers a very fashionable fallacy in a very characteristic fashion. In reply to an aggressive writer who urged that as science advances doctrine alters, he points out that in actual history it is exactly the doctrine that does not alter, and the science that does. When the progressive and advanced person says that the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, let us say, has been abandoned, it is truly answered that the only parts of it that have really been abandoned are those which seemed at the time to be progressive and advanced. The parts found most intangible and most imperishable are really the parts that belong to revelation and religious authority.

-"Wilfrid Ward"
The Dublin Review, Vol. CLIX, No. 314-315, July/October, 1916.

...that proverb that says: "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance,"...is only what the theologians say of every other virtue, and is itself only a way of stating the truth of original sin.

-The Thing (1929)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn and GKC

At the moment, I am reading Race with the Devil, the autobiography of Joseph Pearce just recently released. Joseph Pearce, of course, has written a wonderful biography on Chesterton (Wisdom and Innocence) that I would highly recommend, but his own autobiography and story of conversion is a great story in its own right and inspiring testimony to God's grace. Indeed, I have been looking forward to reading this book for some time, and thus far I have not been disappointed. 

All of that is simply a preface to the following excerpt I just came across, which is directly relevant to this blog, and so I wanted to share (as well as encourage you to get his book!)

...in 1998, as I travelled to Russia at his invitation to interview [Alexander Solzhenitsyn], I had no idea why he should have granted me an exclusive interview when he had shunned the advances of western writers much more accomplished and better known. He had a reputation as being reclusive and also of being suspicious of journalists and biographers in general, and western journalists and biographers in particular. I was, therefore, mystified by his acceptance of my wishful letter requesting an interview. When I had written it,  I had only one published biography to my name. Why on earth would he say "yes" to me when he had said "no" to everyone else. As I pondered this question, it seemed that there was only one likely answer. In my letter I had announced my desire to correct the failure of previous biographies [...] to pay due attention to Solzhenitsyn's religious beliefs. Perhaps Solzhenitsyn had agreed with my critical assessment and perhaps he shared my desire that a biography be published that emphasized the spiritual dimension of his life and work. Although this seemed the only logical explanation for Solzhenitsyn's surprising acceptance of my request for an interview, it didn't explain why he should think me capable of writing such a book. Perhaps, I thought, Solzhenitsyn knew and admired G.K. Chesterton, the subject of my first, and at that time only, biography, which I had of course mentioned in my letter. Perhaps Solzhenitsyn had thought that anyone who had written a biography of Chesterton was qualified to write sensibly and seriously on religious matters. Perhaps "Chesterton" was the magic word that earned me the interview. This suspicion was confirmed upon my arrival when Solzhenityn's wife showed me a dozen or so volumes of the Ignatius Press edition of Chesterton's Collected Works. Clearly, Solzhenitsyn not only knew Chesterton's works but was an avid collector of them!