The Wit and Wisdom of G.K. Chesterton

Nearly everyone who has achieved anything of significance will be quick to acknowledge their gratitude to those influential thinkers, writers, artists, people who came before them. One writer who made an impact on C.S. Lewis was G.K. Chesterton, a prolific British writer whose diverse output covered a multitude of genres from philosophy, ontology, poetry, play writing and journalism to public lecturing, debating, art criticism, biography, Christian apologetics and fiction, including both fantasy and detective stories (cf. The Father Brown Mysteries).

I'm currently reading his pointed book Eugenics and Other Evils and have picked up a volume or two of his Father Brown Mysteries featuring a Roman Catholic priest who is an amateur sleuth on the order of Jessica Lansbury in Murder She Wrote. The latter stories are good fun; his book on eugenics is a serious issues oriented volume intended to bring a moral conscience to a then-pervasive bad idea that had swept the Western world. By this I mean the "ideal" of improving the future of the human race by eliminating bad genes from the gene pool via sterilization. 

Believe it or not, 33 states passed legislation approving this practice which had been promulgated by the liberal elite, including men like J.B.S. Haldane, H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell. It was while researching and writing about eugenics that I came to understand why the London Times was praising Hitler on its editorial pages as late as 1936. It was because he had the courage to follow through on this Darwinian clean-up job to make a more perfect humanity. 

Chesterton's writings in opposition to eugenics inspired Lewis to later put pen to paper and take a critical stance in opposition to cruelty to animals in general and vivisection specifically. 

Alas, I've gone far afield of my intent here. I simply wished to write a preface to some thought provoking quotes by G.K. Chesterton. Note how many are totally relevant a hundred years later.

* * * 

Journalism possesses in itself the potentiality of becoming one of the most frightful monstrosities and delusions that have ever cursed mankind. This horrible transformation will occur at the exact instant at which journalists realize that they can become an aristocracy.
--The New Priests

* * * 

Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of "touching" a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.
--Twelve Types

* * * 

Briefly, you can only find  truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
--Daily News

* * *

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.
--Introduction to the Book of Job

* * *

Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
-- Illustrated London News

* * *

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

* * *

It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged
--Cleveland Press

* * *

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
--Illustrated London News

* * * 

I've searched all the parks in all the cities — and found no statues of Committees.
--As quoted in Trust or Consequences

* * *

The poor object to being governed badly, while the rich object to being governed at all.
--As quoted in Grace at the Table

* * *

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
--Heretics

* * *

There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.
--The Dickens Period

* * * 

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
--Alarms and Discursion

* * * 

Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.

--The Victorian Compromise and Its Enemies

* * * 

The rich are the scum of the earth in every country.
--The Flying Inn

* * *

The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.
--The Father Brown Mysteries

* * *

Hopefully you found something here worth pondering. Chesterton has served us plenty to chew on and digest.