"Horror of humanity"

“I MIGHT inform those humanitarians who have a nightmare of new and needless babies (for some humanitarians have that sort of horror of humanity) that if the recent decline in the birth-rate were continued for a certain time, it might end in there being no babies at all; which would console them very much.”

 

~G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, May 24, 1930.

"Empire of apes"

"DO you see this lantern?" cried Syme in a terrible voice. "Do you see the cross carved on it, and the flame inside? You did not make it. You did not light it. Better men than you, men who could believe and obey, twisted the entrails of iron and preserved the legend of fire. There is not a street you walk on, there is not a thread you wear, that was not made as this lantern was, by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats. You can make nothing. You can only destroy. You will destroy mankind; you will destroy the world. Let that suffice you. Yet this one old Christian lantern you shall not destroy. It shall go where your empire of apes will never have the wit to find it."

~G.K. Chesterton: The Man who was Thursday: A Nightmare.

"A nation of millionaires"

"THERE cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there has never yet been a nation of utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants."

~G.K. Chesterton: The Outline of Sanity.

Peasants by the Hearth, by Pieter Aertsen.
Oil on wood, 1560's; Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp.

"Truth...stranger than fiction"

"TRUTH must necessarily be stranger than fiction; for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it."

~G.K. Chesterton: The Club of Queer Trades.

"How few politicians are hanged"

"THE men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He’s the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It’s terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged today."

~G.K. Chesterton: Cleveland Press interview (March 1, 1921).

"Clever men"

"MANY clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours? "

~G.K. Chesterton: The Napoleon of Notting Hill.

Artwork: Rome: Ruins of the Forum, Looking towards the Capitol, by Canaletto. Oil on canvas, 1742; Royal Collection, Windsor.

"Awful and abstruse statements"

"PHILOSOPHY is not the concern of those who pass through Divinity and Greats, but of those who pass through birth and death. Nearly all the more awful and abstruse statements can be put in words of one syllable, from ‘A child is born’ to ‘A soul is damned.’ If the ordinary man may not discuss existence, why should he be asked to conduct it?"

~G.K. Chesterton: George Bernard Shaw.

Artwork: Logic (or Philosophy), by Luca della Robbia. Stone, c. 1437; Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence.