Gkc Quotes

Poor old G.K.C.! It's too bad he didn't live to see the change. What paradoxes he would have dreamed up!

RAVI ZACHARIAS ON GKC G. K. Chesterton once quipped that before you remove any fence, always ask first why it was put there in the first place. You see, every boundary set by God points to something worth protecting, and if you are to protect the wonder of existence, God’s instruction book is the place to turn. A

Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told.

Loth as one is to agree with CP Snow about almost anything, there are two cultures; and this is rather a problem. (Looking at who pass for public men in these days, one suspects there are now three cultures, in fact, as the professional politician appears to possess neither humane learning nor scientific training. They couldn’t possibly commit the manifold and manifest sins against logic that are their stock in trade, were they possessed of either quality.) … Bereft of a liberal education – ‘liberal’ in the true sense: befitting free men and training men to freedom – our Ever So Eminent Scientists nowadays are most of ’em simply technicians. Very skilled ones, commonly, yet technicians nonetheless. And technicians do get things wrong sometimes: a point that need hardly be laboured in the centenary year of the loss of RMS Titanic. Worse far is what the century of totalitarianism just past makes evident: technicians are fatefully and fatally easily led to totalitarian mindsets and totalitarian collaboration. … Aristotle was only the first of many to observe that men do not become dictators to keep warm: that there is a level at which power, influence, is interchangeable with money. Have enough of the one and you don’t want the other; indeed, you will find that you have the other. And of course, in a world of Eminent Scientists who are mere Technicians at heart, pig-ignorant of liberal (in the Classical sense) ideas, ideals, and even instincts, there is exerted upon them a forceful temptation towards totalitarianism – for the good of the rest of us, poor benighted, unwashed laymen as we are. The fact is that, just as original sin, as GKC noted, is the one Christian doctrine that can be confirmed as true by looking at any newspaper, the shading of one’s conclusions to fit one’s pay-packet, grants, politics, and peer pressure is precisely what anyone familiar with public choice economics should expect. And, as [James] Delingpole exhaustively demonstrates, is precisely what has occurred in the ‘Green’ movement and its scientific – or scientistic – auxiliary. They are watermelons: Green without and Red within. (A similar point was made of the SA by Willi Münzenberg, who referred to that shower as beefsteaks, Red within and Brown without.)

but in any case, it is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment; to see all ages in a sort of splendid foreshortening. That is the use of tradition: it telescopes history. G.K.C.

in their times; we need to see more clearly than we do that the spirit of the age in which he grew to manhood had a deep effect on Chesterton’s personal and intellectual development and on the kind of writer he became: for once we have seen that, we will be able to perceive more clearly, behind the Edwardian journalist, popular versifier, and minor novelist, a more substantial and more prophetic figure, whose proper place is not with such petty luminaries as Max Beerbohm and John Galsworthy, or even with H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw,

success as an apologist: Étienne Gilson called Orthodoxy ‘the best piece of apologetic the century [has] produced’; it brought Dorothy L. Sayers back to Christianity, just as The Everlasting Man brought C. S. Lewis to his famous moment of conversion on Headington Hill. Much remains to be done before Chesterton’s huge oeuvre can be adequately assessed as a major part of the cultural history of the last century.

During the second half of the nineteenth century’, wrote Gilbert’s younger brother Cecil, ‘the middle class was absolutely bubbling over with ideas…. It was rioting in its new-found intellectual liberty as heartily as the men of the Restoration rioted in their new-found moral liberty. Everywhere you found households where new theories of politics, philosophy, religion, or science were eagerly welcomed, debated, and