Tom Monaghan and GKC

Recently I read Monaghan: A Life by Joseph Pearce, which is a biography of Tom Managhan, best known as the founder of Domino's Pizza. In that book, I came across this passage

In 1986, [Dinesh] D'Souza had published a slim volume, entitled The Catholic Classics, designed as an introduction to ten of the most important Catholic works ever published...Certainly, on looking back on his efforts to immerse himself in the Catholic intellectual tradition, it is perhaps significant and hardly surprising that the two works that [Monaghan] chooses to single out for particular mention from this list are those by G.K. Chesterton and Thomas Merton, which are not only the most modern, being the only titles in D'Souza's list that were published in the twentieth century, but indubitably the most accesible to the modern reader.

The Chesterton book referred to is Orthodoxy.

I also came across this interview on Youtube in which Monaghan also makes reference to this list and his reading of Chesterton, albeit only in passing (before going on to detail also how reading a chapter in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis greatly revolutionized his life.)

That great public purpose which [H.G. Wells] causes to control the minutest matters of buying and selling may surely have something to say about the most terrible of human pleasures and the most important of social ties. Why should men be Anarchists about sex who are Socialists about everything else?

-October 6, 1906, (London) Daily News

When somebody wishes to wage a social war against what all normal people have regarded as a social decency, the very first thing he does is to find some artificial term that shall sound relatively decent.

-June 30, 1928, Illustrated London News
[quoted in Gilbert, September/October 2026]

It is an old moral, and obvious enough, that the fashion of this world passes away; yet we often find it hard to believe about the fashion of this age....we are not always eager to realize that all which we call necessary may some day be called nonsense.

-Chaucer (1932)

And, indeed, in this matter, we come in collision with the real objection to this false cult of simplicity. It is not truly childlike, for of all the admirable traits of children, the first and the most striking is an extravagant love of pomp.

-April 4, 1903, Black and White
[found in the book Chesterton in Black and White (2021), edited by Geir Hasnes]

Unfortunately those who talk about priests keeping the people in ignorance, are often those who have been entirely kept in ignorance about priests.

-May 31, 1918, New Witness

...that great thing which men and children enjoy more than beauty or banquets- limitation. A thing given only at a certain time or in a certain manner, or even after a certain difficulty, is always better than a thing given without those restrictions. The part is greater than the whole...For the great value of temperance is not that it increases restraint, but that it increases enjoyment.

-December 24, 1904, (London) Daily News

But surely even the prosaic tyranny of real destitution is less brutal than the fantasy of pity.

-February 15, 1901, (London) Daily News

Common-sense may, therefore, roughly be defined as the power of preserving our real impressions undistorted and intact. It might be thought that this was no very difficult task, and that most men would really describe and criticise this world of ours as they had really seen and felt it. There are, however, a thousand chronicles and experiences to prove that common-sense is anything but common. At the present day especially, hardly any man builds his opinions upon his own original sensibilities, and the one sane man who should do so would seem to us as fantastic as a lunatic. For language has in our time become so full and florid and fluid a thing that it can cover all contradictions and wash out all boundaries and bridge all abysses of inconsistency.

-February 18, 1902, (London) Daily News

Doubtless the best answer to a poet cursing creation is neither fire nor thunder: it is merely to inform him that his enjoyment of that poetic curse has been duly added to the joy of bird and flower in the universal chorus.

-February 12, 1901, (London) Daily News

...the law-giver is wholly unpopular, and is perpetually passing wholly unpopular laws. Intrigue has been substituted for government; and the public man cannot appeal to the public because all the most important part of his policy is conducted in private. The modern politician conducts his public life in private. He sometimes condescends to make up for it by affecting to conduct his private life in public. He will put his baby or his birthday book into the illustrated papers; it is his dealings with the colossal millions of the cosmopolitan millionaires that he puts in his pocket or his private safe. We are allowed to know all about his dogs and cats; but not about those larger and more dangerous animals, his bulls and bears.

-Irish Impressions (1919)

There are more ways than one of committing infanticide; and one way is to murder the infancy without murdering the infant.

-G.K.C. as M.C. (1929)