The principle which dictates that things said of a man immediately after his death shall be as gentle as is possible is a human and a highly intelligible principle. It rests first upon this; that almost every man leaving the world creates an agony in individual affections, the intensity of which is greater even than that of patriotic anger; it rests secondly on this; that every man dying is going where he may be understood for the first time. To put the matter briefly, we speak as well as may be of a dead man, for two reasons. The first is that some men knew him; the second is that no man knew him.

-July 21, 1906, Daily News

The intrinsic and terrible peril of the present tendency is that it is not, even in theory, the growth of great things; it is only the growth of small things until they are in fact big. A power which is, in practice, like the central power of government, will be given to something that is not a central government, but only a centralized business. When it exists, it will be exactly like Socialism in being uniform, universal, official, oppressive.

-G.K.'s Weekly, March 24, 1928

[Found in July/August 2021 issue of Gilbert!]