The Anchoress

Dusting a bookshelf I came across an old anthology and thought I’d pass on a few nuggets - some of them seem quite revelent to our times, even written 100 years ago.

Just for fun, I have chosen some quotes which may or may not be about people or issues in the news, or even some bloggers or pundits. You decide what is about what or whom. There are no right or wrong answers, and some of Chesterton’s pithiest observations can end up having you thinking on them all day.

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1) Our Civilization has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men to know no more law than I know, but who can feel the thing that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind, it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round. The same thing was done, if I remember right, by the founder of Christianity.
-Tremendous Trifles.

2) When a man says that democracy is false because most people are stupid, hit him smartly and with precision on the exact tip of the nose.
- Illustrated London News, 1905

3) It cannot be too often repeated that all real democracy is an attempt (like that of a jolly hostess) to bring the shy people out. For every practical purpose of a political state, for every practical purpose of a tea-party, he that abseth himself must be exalted. At a tea-party it is equally obvious that he that exalteth himself must be abased, if possible without bodily violence. Now people talk of democracy as being coarse and turbulent; it is a self-evident error in mere history. Aristocracy is the thing that is always coarse and turbulent; for it means appealing to the self-confident people. Democracy means appealing to the diffident people. Democracy means getting those people to vote who would never have the cheek to govern; and (according to Christian ethics) the precise people who ought to govern are the people who have not the cheek to do it.
- Tremendous Trifles

4) Democracy is not philanthropy; it is not even altruism or social reform. Democracy is not founded on pity for the common man; democracy is founded on reverence for the common man, or, if you will, even on fear of him. It does not champion man because man is so miserable, but because man is so sublime. It does not object so much to the ordinary man being a slave as to his not being a king, for its dream is always the dream of the first Roman republic, a nation of kings.
- Heretics.

5) A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
-Illustrated London News 1906

6) The man who is content to say “We do not want theologians splitting hairs,” will doubtless be content to go on and say, “We do not want surgeons splitting filaments more delicate than hairs.” It is the fact that many a man would be dead today, if his doctors had not debated the fine shades about doctoring. It is also the fact that European civilization would be dead today, if its doctors of divinity had not debated fine shades about doctrine.
- The Resurrection of Rome

7 ) Men talk of philosophy and theology as if they were something specialistic and arid and academic. But philosophy and theology are not only the only democratic things, they are democratic to the point of being vulgar, I was going to say, of being rowdy. They alone admit all matters; they alone lie open to all attacks.
- G.F. Watts

It is one of the journalist’s tragedies that whenever he introduces a thing purely as an impossibility, someone writes to say that it really occured. If I use a foolish metaphor at random I generally receive two letters - one complaining that the thing is too violent and absurd, the other saying that it happened to the writer’s aunt.
- Illustrated London News, 1906

9) Reason itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thougths have any relation to reality at all.
- Orthodoxy

10) There are a hundred magazines, but only about five stories.
- ILN 1926

11) The quicker goes the journalist the slower go his thoughts. The result is the newspaper of our time, which every day can be delivered earlier and earlier, and which every day is less worth delivering at all.
- Eugenics and Other Evils

12) Obedience. The most thrilling word in the world; a very thunderclap of a word. Why do these fools fancy that the soul is only free when it disagrees with the common command? Even the mobs who rise to burn and destroy owe all their granduer and terror, and a sort of authority, not to their anger, but to their agreement. Why should mere disagreement make us feel free?
- The Surprise

13) People will tell you that theology became too elaborate because it was dead. Believe me, if it had been dead it would never have become too elaborate; it is only the live tree that grows too many branches.
- Tremendous Trifles

14 ) Pride is a weakness in the character; it dries up laughter, it dries up wonder, it dries up chivalry and energy.
- Heretics

15) The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.
- What I Saw in America

16) If people cannot mind their own business it cannot be more economical to pay them to mind each other’s business; and still less to mind each other’s babies; it is simply throwing away a natural force and then paying for an artificial force: as if a man were to water a plant with a hose while holding up an umbrella to protect it from the rain.
- The Superstition of Divorce

17) When you choose anything, you reject everything else.
- Orthodoxy

18 ) How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe?
- What’s Wrong With the World

19) Our fathers did not talk about psychology; they talked about a knowledge of Human Nature. But they had it, and we have not. They knew by instinct all that we have ignored by the help of information. For it is exactly the first facts about human nature that are now being ignored by humanity.
- Sidelights

20) Take away the supernatural, and what remains is the unnatural.
- Heretics

21) We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right. What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong.
- The Church and Conversion

22) To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
- A Short History of England

23) Right is right, even if nobody does it. WRong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.
- All Things Considered

24) I have a notion that the real advice I could give to a young journalist is simply this: to write an article for the Sporting Times and one for the Church Times and put them in the wrong envelopes…what is really the matter with almost every paper is that it is much too full of things suitable to the paper.
- Autobiography.

25) The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.
-G.F. Watts

26) A woman cooking may not always cook artistically; still she can cook artistically. She can introduce a personal and imperceptible variation into the composition of a soup. The clerk is not encouraged to introduce a personal and impercetible variation into the figures in a ledger.
- All Things Considered

27) It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.
-Orthodoxy

28) Those who complain of our creeds as elaborate often forget that the elaborate Western creeds have produced the elaborate Western constitutions; and that they are elaborate because they are emanicpated.
- The New Jerusalem

29) Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head…Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal ever invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink.
- Illustrated London News 1907

30) The self is more distant than any star.
- Orthodoxy

And just because I like it, one of Baldilock’s best posts, ever.