"The Higher Culture...is quite fleeting"

"THE Higher Culture to which I was referring is a quite fleeting and fundamentally caddish sort of culture, filling up the gap which everyone has felt since we gave up real religion and real politics; since we gave up thinking about God and fighting about man."

~G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, May 12, 1906.

"A world too self-indulgent"

"SOMETIMES the best business of an age is to resist some alien invasion; sometimes to preach practical self-control in a world too self-indulgent and diffused; sometimes to prevent the growth in the State of great new private enterprises that would poison or oppress it. Above all it may sometimes happen that the highest task of a thinking citizen may be to do the exact opposite of the work which the Radicals had to do. It may be his highest duty to cling on to every scrap of the past that he can find, if he feels that the ground is giving way beneath him and sinking into mere savagery and forgetfulness of all human culture."

~G.K. Chesterton: Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens, Ch. XVI, "A Child's History Of England."