Et dixit Chesterton

Posting a letter and getting married are among the few things left that are entirely romantic; for to be entirely romantic a thing must be irrevocable.
GK Chesterton

Et dixit Johnson

The causes of good and evil are so various and uncertain, so often entangled with each other, so diversified by various relations, and so much subject to accidents which cannot be foreseen, that he who would fix his condition upon incontestable reasons of preference, must live and die inquiring and deliberating.
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, p77

Et dixit Johnson

Inconsistencies cannot both be right, but, imputed to man, they may both be true.
Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, p56

Et dixit Lewis - Taproots

Re: recent fuss about some dead bimbo whose name I can't remember and will not look up.

There, right in the midst of our lives, is that which satisfies the craving for inequality, and acts as a permanent reminder that medicine is not food. Hence a man’s reaction to monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be debunked, but watch the faces, mark well the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach - men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.
CS Lewis

Et dixit Koestler 2

It had also been hammered into my head, and into the heads of two hundred million Russians, that to pay undue attention to relics and monuments of the past was the sign of a morbid, sentimental, romantic and escapist attitude...The Communist's duty was not to observe the world but to change it; his eyes were to focus on the present and the future, not on the the past. The history of mankind would start with the world revolution; all that went before was merely a chaotic, barbaric overture...

The same was true of philosphy, architecture and the fine arts...Auden's call to clear from the head of the masses the impressive rubbish expresses a similar attitude...It was less absurd than it appears today; born out of the despair of world war and civil war, of social unrest and economic chaos, the desire for a complete break with the past, for starting human history from scratch, was deep and genuine.
Arthur Koestler, The Invisible Writing, p72

Et dixit Koestler

From The Invisible Writing by Arthur Koestler. Becoming a comrade:

I learnt that the rules of common decency, of loyalty and fair play were not absolute rules, but the ephemeral projections of bourgeois society. Antiquity had one code of honour; the feudal era another; capitalist society still another, which the ruling class was trying to sell us as eternal laws. But absolute rules of ethics did not exist. Each class, as it became dominant in history, had reshaped these so-called laws according to its interests. The Revolution could not be achieved according to the laws of cricket. It supreme law was that the ends justified the means; its supreme guide the method of dialectical materialism.
(p32)

Official meeting of a communist cell

The cell met once a week, but the more active members were in daily contact with one another. The official meeting always started with a political lecture by an instructor from district Headquarters (or by the cell leader after he had been briefed at H.Q.), in which the line was laid down concerning the various questions of the day. This was followed by discussion, but a discussion of a peculiar kind. It is basic rule of Communist discipline that, once the party has decided to adopt a certain line regarding a given problem, all criticism of that decision becomes deviationist sabotage. In theory, discussion is possible before a decision has been reached; in practice, decisions are always imposed from above, without previous consultation with the rank and file. One of the slogans of the German party said: 'The front-line is no place for discussions.' Another said: 'Wherever a Communist happens to be, he is always in the front-line.' So our dicussions always showed a complete unanimity of opinion.
(p27)