I have always understood that charity meant a kind and reverent handling of the actions of sinners, an allowance for their temptations, an unconquerable hope for their souls. I do not quite understand what charity can have to do with the denying of the existence of the sin. If you admit that Lord Foodle or Mr. Nathan Boodle have committed crimes; then I will show them charity and enough to melt a mad elephant. But if you say they have not, then either you are not a charitable man, but an ordinary normal liar, or else they are blameless people and not objects of charity at all. Charity does not hide sins. Charity exposes sins, but exposes also their excuses. Charity does not ask us to flatter the tyrant in his strength. Charity asks us to pity the tyrant in his weakness. Charity has for its business the searching out of the deepest and darkest part of a man, which is often also the most lovable; charity finds those secret and perverse ideals of which the criminal himself will not speak, and reveals the strange extenuations which he hides more cravenly than his crimes.

-August 5, 1905, Daily News

In the Morning Post only this morning I see a solemn leading article blaming a politician for attacking an editor. Seeing that editors have no other purpose on this planet except to attack politicians, I cannot very clearly see where the wickedness comes in. Is an editor a soldier, or is he only a spy? The Morning Post speaks of the "courage" of the Spectator. Really, with the kindest will in the world, I do not think it requires much "courage" to maintain any of the opinions of the Spectator. But, according to the Morning Post, it must be positively cowardly; for it is free to attack statesmen because they have no right of reply.

-November 12, 1910, Illustrated London News

"...to be a failure may be one step to being a saint."

[...] Dickens shows none of that dreary submission to the environment of the irrevocable that had for an instant lain on him like a cloud. On this occasion he sees with the old heroic clarity that to be a failure may be one step to being a saint. On the third day he rose again from the dead.

-Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens (1911)

All men are ordinary men. The extraordinary men are those who know it.

-The Uses of Diversity (1921)

We must not hate humanity, or despise humanity, or refuse to help humanity; but we must not trust humanity; in the sense of trusting a trend in human nature which cannot turn back to bad things. “Put not your trust in princes; nor in any child of man.” That is the precise point of this very practical sort of politics. Be a Royalist if you like (and there is a vast amount to be said, and a vast amount being said, just now, for more personal and responsible rule); try a Monarchy if you think it will be better; but do not trust a Monarchy, in the sense of expecting that a monarch will be anything but a man. Be a Democrat if you like (and I shall always think it the most generous and the most fundamentally Christian ideal in politics); express your sense of human dignity in manhood suffrage or any other form of equality; but put not your trust in manhood suffrage or in any child of man. There is one little defect about Man, the image of God, the wonder of the world and the paragon of animals; that he is not to be trusted. If you identify him with some ideal, which you choose to think is his inmost nature or his only goal, the day will come when he will suddenly seem to you a traitor.

-The Well and the Shallows (1935)

The new method of journalism is to offer so many comments or, at least, secondary circumstances that there is actually no room left for the original facts.

-November 6, 1909, Illustrated London News

[H/T G.K. Chesterton Facebook page]

"The man whom I accuse has no right merely to say that I insult him; I do not insult, I accuse."

Everyone discusses whether such a statement is an insult; no one whether it is a truth. But in any matter of public good, insult is irrelevancy. If a thing is false it is not an insult; it is a lie. If it is true it is not an insult; it is an exposure. If I call out in a crowd, 'This man has picked my pocket', I am not to be objected to merely because I am noisy. I am either a slanderer or I am a public servant. In neither case am I a mere rioter. The man whom I accuse has no right merely to say that I insult him; I do not insult, I accuse.

-February 24, 1906, Daily News

Neil Gorsuch quotes GKC

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch recently quoted GKC. (Well, technically, he alluded to a passage from him, anyway).

But in a dissent, Justice Neil Gorsuch said Ginsberg had gotten the issues all wrong in the case. He was joined in dissent by justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito.

Borrowing from the English writer and philosopher G.K. Chesterton, Gorsush  [sic] said there’s a danger in clearing away “a fence just because we cannot see its point.”

“Even if a fence doesn’t seem to have a reason, sometimes all that means is we need to look more carefully for the reason it was built in the first place,” he said. “The same might be said about the law before us.”

To Gorsush [sic] what Ginsburg and her colleagues in the majority had done was clear away a traditional rule cause they mistakenly overlooked the original reasons for it [...]

Gorush [sic] concluded by accusing the majority of clearing away a fence “that once marked a basic boundary between federal and state power.

“Maybe it wasn’t the most vital fence and maybe we’ve just simply forgotten why this particular fence was built in the first place. But maybe, too, we’ve forgotten because we’ve wandered so far from the idea of a federal government of limited and enumerated powers that we’ve begun to lose sight of what it looked like in the first place,” Gorsuch wrote.

[Source]

And here is the passage in GKC's writing to which he alludes.

The point is not that if we go on as we are we shall collide with some frightful fate. The point is rather that unless we make a magnificent effort, our frightful fate will be- to go on as we are.

-February 24, 1906, Daily News

The soldier in all ages has been regarded as a man in so very extraordinary a position that a particular glory surrounded him because he had to endure it. For a desperate need of the Commonwealth he is a sort of splendid slave. The nation which takes away from him the most ordinary human rights tries to give him as some sort of compensation the military legend. Take that away, and he would be strictly a slave.

-April 2, 1904, Daily News

People have got into their heads an extraordinary idea that English public-school boys and English youth generally are taught to tell the truth. They are taught absolutely nothing of the kind. At no English public school is it even suggested, except by accident, that it is a man’s duty to tell the truth. What is suggested is something entirely different: that it is a man’s duty not to tell lies. So completely does this mistake soak through all civilisation that we hardly ever think even of the difference between the two things. When we say to a child, “You must tell the truth,” we do merely mean that he must refrain from verbal inaccuracies. But the thing we never teach at all is the general duty of telling the truth, of giving a complete and fair picture of anything we are talking about, of not misrepresenting, not evading, not suppressing, not using plausible arguments that we know to be unfair, not selecting unscrupulously to prove an ex parte case, not telling all the nice stories about the Scotch, and all the nasty stories about the Irish, not pretending to be disinterested when you are really angry, not pretending to be angry when you are really only avaricious. The one thing that is never taught by any chance in the atmosphere of public schools is exactly that—that there is a whole truth of things, and that in knowing it and speaking it we are happy.

-All Things Considered (1908)

Philanthropists too frequently forget that pity is quite a different thing from sympathy; for sympathy means suffering with others and not merely being sorry that they suffer. If the strong brotherhood of men is to abide, if they are not to break up into groups alarmingly like different species, we must keep this community of tastes in giver and received. We must not only share our bread, but share our hunger.

-The Glass Walking-Stick (1955)