Saturday, July 27, 2013

The disease called aphasia, in which people begin by saying tea when they mean coffee, commonly ends in their silence. Silence of this stiff sort is the chief mark of the powerful parts of modern society. They all seem to be straining to keep things in rather than to let things out… Even the newspaper editors and proprietors are more despotic and dangerous by what they do not utter than by what they do. We have all heard the expression ‘golden silence’. The expression ‘brazen silence’ is the only adequate phrase for our editors. If we wake out of this throttled, gaping, wordless nightmare, we must awake with a yell.

-A Miscellany of Men (1912)


H/T to a poster on this G.K. Chesterton Facebook page 

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