Our great calamity to-day is the failure of words to bind...Everybody picks up a word when it helps him, and throws it away when it hinders him, without worrying about its truth or meaning...We shall not advance an inch in any of the arguments of to-day till people can be induced to see that a word can only be used as a spell, or even as a curse, so long as we keep it sacred.

-February 15, 1913, Illustrated London News

Gossip is a thing which for some reason or other is spoken of with an intonation of disdain. We have all read meditations by modern ladies and gentlemen, saying how sad and mysterious it is that the old women in the Whitechapel Road talk about their neighbours, and refuse to talk about culture or evolution. Yet the reason why they do not talk about culture and evolution but do talk about their neighbours is, after all, a very simple one. They do it because their neighbours are much more important a subject than culture or evolution. Long before anybody had ever heard of culture or evolution people had begun in the old primitive and religious phrase to consider their duty towards their neighbour. And one of our duties towards our neighbour is to talk about him.

It is hard for the average man to love his neighbour as he loves himself; but he had at least taken some step towards the Christian ideal if he can worry about his neighbour as he worries about himself. And it is entirely absurd of the modern education idealists to demand humanitarianism and yet discourage gossip. Gossip is the one really practical form of humanitarianism established securely in the world. It is the really practical, popular, and existing confession of human fraternity. These simple people, women especially, are accused of talking trivialities about people. How strangely blasphemous is the very idea and expression. How can there be any such thing as trivialities about People? How can we expect the landlady in Whitechapel to desert the really deep, complex, and intellectual problem of the lady next door for the sake of some lecturer's superficialities about Dante or Browning? No, my philanthropic friends, the poor will do justice to culture on the day that you do justice to gossip.

If, then, I say that such books as Mr. Fitzgerald's book on Dickens are gossip; it is not a thing to be condemned either from a moral or from an intellectual point of view. Gossip may be defined roughly as a continuous interest in all minor human matters. It is a refusal to 'mind one's own business'—that heathen and egotistical commandment.

-September 13, 1905, Daily News (London)

Sigrid Undset and GKC

Sigred Undset, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928, and whose cause for canonization as a Catholic saint has recently been announced, was a great admirer of GKC, and even visited his home on one occasion. She also translated his masterpiece The Everlasting Man into Norweigan.

The Society of G.K. Chesterton has posted the Afterword to her translation of that book on its website:

Sigrid Undset's Afterword to The Everlasting Man

Vice President JD Vance quotes Chesterton

Bishop Barron recently interviewed Vice President J.D. Vance, in the course of which interview, the Vice President quoted GKC. (Well, technically, he quoted the famous "believe in anything" quotation which is often attributed to GKC, though it seems a paraphrase of two different passages from GKC)

https://youtu.be/aCpBXzEoG00?si=GGKPVJTGKLqgvI4-&t=2509

The vote is only a cheque that is sure to be dishonoured.

-May 15, 1913, New Witness

Dion and GKC

Another mention of GKC from Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Dion DiMucci:

Dion slowly raised his arm and pointer finger. "Now, I believe these New Atheists think that true, intelligent believers have no brains and are childlike, as if they believe in superstition and fairy tales. But nothing could be further from the truth. Everything these four horsemen bring up has been dealt with and answered by brilliant men and thinkers like Saint Thomas Aquinas, G.K. Chesterton, and C.S. Lewis. Nothing new here. I heard it all before when my father came back from England with stories about Bertrand Russell. It's a boring playbook to me."

-Dion: The Rock 'N' Roll Philosopher (Dion DiMucci and Adam Jablin, 2025)

JJ Niekro and GKC

JJ Niekro (son of former pitcher Joe Niekro, and the nephew of Hall of Fame pitcher Phil Niekro), mentions in this interview that he loves GKC and (at the time of the interview) he had read Orthodoxy and was reading The Well and the Shallows.

Pope Leo quotes GKC

Pope Leo recently quoted GKC:

There is a quote from the author Chesterton that can serve as a key to understanding everything I would like to share with you: "Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural" (cf. Heretics, VI). Man is not made to live closed in on himself, but in a living relationship with God. When that relationship is obscured or weakened, life begins to fall into disorder from within. The unnatural is not only the scandalous; it is enough to live without God in daily life, leaving him out of the criteria and decisions with which we face existence. [Source]

Our complex theology is only complex when we study it. It is simple when we see it. It can be seen as a whole and loved like a person. The plainest peasant in the smallest church sees it as a single thing, and the greatest Catholic scholar still sees it as the same thing

-Preface of To Modernism and the Christian Church by Francis Woodlock, S.J. (1925)

We are constantly reminded, especially by those stunted sceptics who seem never to get beyond one step in thought, that many of the popular customs of Christmas are pagan things. In one sense it is true, though in the sense they mean it is untrue. Most of us were pagans before we were christened; but that does not necessarily make us pagans now. And this is quite as true of an institution as of an individual.

-December 24, 1921, Illustrated London News

New BBC series including Chesterton as a character

From the latest "Gilbert" magazine (November/December 2025), an interesting bit of news:

BBC Television has announced plans to make a series on The Detection Club. Set in the 1930s, the golden age of detective fiction, The Detection Club actually existed, and its most illustrious writers were Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and G.K. Chesterton. The series will be centered around these three who will join forces to solve real-life murders. 'Honing their craft within the hallowed walls of a secret London location, the three writers come together after receiving an invitation that leads them to their first real murder case. The series follows the trio as they work together to crack cases, all to the despair of D.I. Greenway, a young, rookie, real-life detective.' Production is scheduled to commence in 2026. The actors have not yet been cast. Wouldn't it be great if they got Chesterton right?

 "I want to pay tribute...to G.K. Chesterton, whose paradoxical and savory wisdom was a knighthood of God."

-Jacques Maritain, "Contemporary Renewals in Religious Thought"
(found in book Religion and the Modern World, p. 8)