In modern times we have had a vast increase in the sort of education that the ignorant can impose and a vast decrease in the sort of instruction that only the instructed can provide. The politician, who merely declares that so many thousand copies of such and such standard works shall be distributed to such and such schools, is in that exact sense an ignorant man. The agricultural labourer, who shows his son how to use a pruning-hook, is in that exact sense a learned man.

-G.K.C. as M.C. (1929)

Mr. Archer does not seem to understand laughing at one's own ideals. If our ideals have once endured our laughter they can endure all the laughter of our enemies [...] Being funny has nothing to do with being untrue or undesirable. I think it funny to put food into one's mouth; but I have no intention of discontinuing the habit.

-September 14, 1907, Daily News

An old interview with Larry Norman from 2005, the "Father of Jesus Rock" music, and the former brother-in-law of Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society:

http://www.alivingdog.com/LarryInt2.html

The sort of sentiment I want the politicians to study, not without tears, took some such form as this: "Beware of Luxury, the eternal enemy of Liberty." The old friends of freedom never tired of insisting, in what seems to some a turgid and florid manner, on the necessity of simplicity in the life of a champion of the people. The pleasures of the court were for the courtier. The tribune must know nothing between the field and the forum [...] one truth, vivid to every friend of freedom a hundred years ago, has now become a blind spot on the brain. It is no longer Liberty against Luxury, but Liberty for the sake of Luxury. The result is a corruption that eats out the heart of representative government.

-March 3, 1928, Illustrated London News

It is simply an unchanging quality in the nature of man that he is fickle, moody, and one-sided; that he stresses now one point in morals and now another, neglects one virtue and then goes on in progressive triumph to neglect another; that he is overpowered by whatever is recent and generally ignorant of what is remote; and, above all, that he mistakes experience for existence, and supposes that what he sees is all that there is to see. There certainly is in human nature this changing quality; and it is an unchanging quality.

-June 9, 1934, Illustrated London News

A self-conscious simplicity may well be far more intrinsically ornate than luxury itself. Indeed, a great deal of the pomp and sumptuousness of the world’s history was simple in the truest sense.  It was born of an almost babyish receptiveness; it was the work of men who had eyes to wonder and men who had ears to hear.

-The Common Man (1950)

For after all, blame is itself a compliment. It is a compliment because it is an appeal; and an appeal to a man as a creative artist making his soul. To say to a man, "rascal" or "villain" in ordinary society may seem abrupt; but it is also elliptical. It is an abbreviation of a sublime spiritual apostrophe for which there may be no time in our busy social life. When you meet a millionaire, the cornerer of many markets, out at dinner in Mayfair, and greet him (as is your custom) with the exclamation "Scoundrel!" you are merely shortening for convenience some such expression as: "How can you, having the divine spirit of man that might be higher than the angels, drag it down so far as to be a scoundrel?" When you are introduced at a garden party to a Cabinet Minister who takes tips on Government contracts, and when you say to him in the ordinary way "Scamp!" you are merely using the last word of a long moral disquisition; which is in effect, "How pathetic is the spiritual spectacle of this Cabinet Minister, who being from the first made glorious by the image of God, condescends so far to lesser ambitions as to allow them to turn him into a scamp." It is a mere taking of the tail of a sentence to stand for the rest; like saying 'bus for omnibus. It is even more like the case of that seventeenth century Puritan whose name was something like "If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned, Higgins"; but who was, for popular convenience, referred to as "Damned Higgins." But it is obvious, anyhow, that when we call a man a coward, we are in so doing asking him how he can be a coward when he could be a hero. When we rebuke a man for being a sinner, we imply that he has the powers of a saint.

-Fancies Versus Fads (1923)

[...] tradition, if it exists at all, is always much fresher and more forcible than anything else [...]

-The Spirit of Christmas (1984)

Those modern theologians who insist that Christianity is not in doctrines, but in spirit, commonly fail to notice that they are exposing themselves to a test more abrupt and severe than that of doctrine itself. Some legal preliminaries at least are necessary before a man can be burned for his opinions; but without any preliminaries at all a man can be shot for his tone of voice.

-The Spirit of Christmas (1984)

For though to-day is always to-day and the moment is always modern, we are the only men in all history who fell back upon bragging about the mere fact that to-day is not yesterday. I fear that some in the future will explain it by saying that we had precious little else to brag about.

-All I Survey (1933)

Pride is not only only an enemy to instruction. Pride is an enemy to amusement. The main lesson of St. Francis of Assisi is this idea of an almost fantastic self-effacement corresponding to an almost fantastic pleasure.

-Lunacy and Letters (1958)

[...] melancholy is a frivolous thing compared with the seriousness of joy. Melancholy is negative, it has to do with trivialities like death: joy is positive and has to answer for the renewal and perpetuation of being. Melancholy is irresponsible; it could watch the universe fall to pieces: joy is responsible and upholds the universe in the void of space.

-June 11, 1901, Daily News