The following is an essay I wrote back in 2010 for a Gen Ed English class at school.

Since I had to write an argumentative essay, but wanted a comparatively "safe" subject, I argued that GKC was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. (I would have put "greatest", but I decided to keep my claims more modest.)

My teacher wrote:

This is one of the better papers I've had in any of my classes, especially when it comes to the research you've done. Bravo for proving me wrong. :-) 

I decided it would perhaps be a good idea to post it here, for anyone interested.

In logic a wise man will always put the cart before the horse. That is to say, he will always put the end before the means; when he is considering the question as a whole. He does not construct a cart in order to exercise a horse. He employs a horse to draw a cart, and whatever is in the cart. In all modern reasoning there is a tendency to make the mere political beast of burden more important than the chariot of man it is meant to draw.

-Irish Impressions (1919)

For men are really brothers, and it is only people who know nothing of brotherhood who fancy that this is contradicted by the fact that they fight each other.

-August 15, 1903, Daily News

Now it is a common charge against the American Republic that it is unhistoric and has no past; but the charge is singularly false. It has a past which is not only historic, but heroic. Nay, it is heroic not only in the normal sense of things that are historic, but almost in the sense in which we speak of the prehistoric. We feel there was a heroic age of the Republic; and a legend of its founding, like the legend of Rome. Its founders built on affirmations so wide and (as they themselves truly said) so self-evident that there was something about them beyond place and time. There really is something about the Declaration of Independence that is almost like the stone tables of the Ten Commandments. It is so much a fact that, if we like it, we can even make fun of it; and the Americans themselves do make fun of it. In their own stories they do treat the cherry-tree of George Washington as something like the apple-tree of Adam. In their own lighter moments, they do seem to imply that Benjamin Franklin must have been as much of a bore and a nuisance as Socrates. But men only deal thus lightly with things that they feel as ancient and fundamental; and there is this feeling about the American fundamentals. It does not, for instance, seem unnatural to talk about the Father of the Republic, as we talk of the Fathers of the Christian Church or of the old pagan city. And the idea for which they stood is one that can never be merely new-fangled, just as it can never be merely old-fashioned; something which can be denied, but can never be discredited; something which they expressed far better, but which (in the looser language of modernity) is expressed best by saying that the normal man must be master of the national fate.

-March 23, 1918, Illustrated London News

[A]ll education is religious education- and never more than when it is irreligious education. It either teaches a definite doctrine about the universe, which is theology; or else it takes one for granted, which is mysticism. If it does not do that it does nothing at all, and means nothing at all, for everything must depend upon some first principles and refer to some causes, expressed or unexpressed.

-July 26,1924, Illustrated London News

What fun it would be if good actors suddenly acted like real people!

-March 16, 1912, Illustrated London News

GKC "correcting" Shaw about the meaning of Shaw's own play....lol.

I seem destined to differ from Mr. Bernard Shaw just now. And having had the honour to differ from him about Shakespeare's plays I have now the even greater honour to differ from him about his own. Mr. Shaw's mistakes about the meaning of his own plays arise from the same source as his Shakespearean errors, a lack of warmth and poesy. Mr Huneker quotes in his book [...] Mr. Shaw's own account of the character of Candida. 'Candida' always appeared to me not only as the noblest work of Mr. Shaw, but as one of the noblest, if not the noblest, of modern plays; a most square and manly piece of moral truth. And with the authority of a close student of the work, I assure the author of it that if he imagines that he understands the character of Candida he is quite mistaken. Mr. Shaw says of Candida: 'Morell himself sees that "no law will bind her". She seduces Eugene just as far as it is worth her while to seduce him. She is a woman without "character" in the conventional sense. She is straight for natural reasons, not for conventional ethical ones." The fact of the matter is that Candida, being a strong woman and not a half-witted anarchist, knows, as all sane people do know, that 'convention' is a thing quite as real as 'nature', perhaps much more real than nature. Strong, experienced human souls accept the facts of habit, the magic of time, the need for continuity, the working loyalties, the compromises of fellowship, as they accept the sun and moon. Laws are not dead things, as the foolish Bohemians think, and as Mr. Huneker, and even Mr. Shaw, tend here to think them. Laws are living things, like songs; and for the same reason, for both songs and laws are filled with the passion and vigilance of mankind. To despise them is not to be a free man, but simply to be an unusually silly misanthrope. How far laws should sometimes be defied is another matter; but they should never be despised- for they are humanity.

-April 26, 1905, Daily News

The point about the Press is that it is not what it is called. It is not the "popular Press." It is not the public Press. It is not an organ of public opinion. It is a conspiracy of a very few millionaires, all sufficiently similar in type to agree on the limits of what this great nation (to which we belong) may know about itself and its friends and enemies. The ring is not quite complete; there are old-fashioned and honest papers: but it is sufficiently near to completion to produce on the ordinary purchaser of news the practical effects of a corner and a monopoly. He receives all his political information and all his political marching orders from what is by this time a sort of half-conscious secret society, with very few members, but a great deal of money.

-Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays (1917)

[T]he cynical use of the enormous power of journalism is a thing which an honest man ought to fight against furiously and for ever.

-November 23, 1907, Daily News

There are some who say that Shakespeare was vitally anti-democratic, because every now and then he curses the rabble- as if every lover of the people had not often had cause to curse the rabble. For this is the very definition of the rabble- it is the people when the people are undemocratic.

-Lunacy and Letters (1958)

Music is mere beauty; it is beauty in the abstract, beauty in solution. It is a shapeless and liquid element of beauty, in which a man may really float, not indeed affirming the truth, but not denying it.

-George Bernard Shaw (1909)

What was the matter with most reformers [...] was that the reformers were never contented or even concerned to reform. They were not satisfied to alter the abnormal in favour of the normal; they were much more eager to alter the normal in favour of the novel. The trick that has tripped up generation after generation of perfectly just reformers is that they were more interested in some particular new-fangled plan than they were in pointing out the old and obvious evil. The removal of every abuse or abomination was always tangled and tied hand and foot with some temporary and trumpery fad.

-October 28, 1922, Illustrated London News