In the most modern politics, unfortunately, it may truly be said that those who make history never know history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

-The End of the Armistice 
(collection of essays published posthumously in 1940)

 

Perhaps a truly great thing always tries to grow small; and there is hidden here a mystery of microscopic ambition. For though the Magnificat magnifies the Lord, it is only just after the Lord has minimized Himself.

-The Resurrection of Rome (1930)

GKC in "The Sandman" Netflix series (sort of...)

GKC (sort of) in "The Sandman" Netflix series, and about a minute into the clip quoting from GKC's book Orthodoxy:

"...the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power..."

Obviously, the character of Gilbert/Fiddler's Green is not literally GKC, but he was modeled on GKC (Neil Gaiman being an admirer of Chesterton).

Terry Deary on GKC

Terry Deary, describing the books that changed his life, the first on the list being GKC's The Napoelon of Notting Hill

My school texts like the Thomas Hardy we were forced to read were so dull. When I came across this Chesterton book at the age of around 17 then I realised books could be exciting and create colourful new worlds. I understood that books don’t have to be serious and filled with miserable heroes like Tess of the D’Urbervilles or the Mayor of Casterbridge. They can lead to a meeting with fantastical people. Chesterton made me a writer.

https://www.readersdigest.co.uk/culture/books/meet-the-author/terry-deary-books-that-changed-my-life

Roma Downey quoting GKC

Well, OK, to speak more strictly, she actually misattributed a quote to GKC, it would appear. But still....

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10156164832444273

J.K. Rowling also once misattributed a quote to GKC on Twitter (that someone had first misattributed to her), and ironically enough had the hashtag "#CorrectAttributionDay" :-) 

Charlotte Mason

I have reflected; and I think I see the place of the amateur.

The obscure things, the details and disputed points, the great scholar can always see and note better than we can. It is the obvious things that he cannot see. I do not say this in mere depreciation; I think it is really inseparable from that concentrated research to which the world owes so much. It is the truth in the traditional picture of the absent-minded professor, who remains gazing at a fossil or a Roman coin and fails to observe external objects, such as a house on fire, a revolution, an escaped elephant putting its head through the skylight, and similar things....it is precisely because I am so much less learned than he that it is my privilege to lead him through common ways, pointing out elephants and other enormous objects.

-The Superstition of the Sceptic (1925)

"The New War on Christmas"

G.K.'s Weekly, 
December 26, 1925

[To] accept the conclusions of science, it is necessary that science should conclude. And science never does conclude. It is the whole claim and boast of science that she never does conclude. To conclude means to shut up; and the very last thing the man of science is likely to do is to shut up [...] it is the whole point of science never to be in this sense final or irrevocable. Of course, this does not mean that we shall not work more wisely if we work in the light of the suggestions of science, or take note of the general tendencies of science. It only means that people who use these words ten thousand times a year have not taken note of what they are saying [...] If science had concluded, it would mean almost literally that science had shut up shop.

-G.K.'s Weekly, March 21, 1925

 "The Christmas Carol" is a kind of philanthropic dream, an enjoyable nightmare, in which the scenes shift bewilderingly and seem as miscellaneous as the pictures in a scrap-book, but in which there is one constant state of the soul, a state of rowdy benediction and a hunger for human faces. The beginning is about a winter day and a miser; yet the beginning is in no way bleak. The author starts with a kind of happy howl; he bangs on our door like a drunken carol singer; his style is festive and popular; he compares the snow and hail to philanthropists who "come down handsomely;" he compares the fog to unlimited beer. Scrooge is not really inhuman at the beginning any more than he is at the end. There is a heartiness in his inhospitable sentiments that is akin to humour and therefore to humanity; he is only a crusty old bachelor, and had (I strongly suspect) given away turkeys secretly all his life. The beauty and the real blessing of the story do not lie in the mechanical plot of it, the repentance of Scrooge, probable or improbable; they lie in the great furnace of real happiness that glows through Scrooge and everything around him; that great furnace, the heart of Dickens. Whether the Christmas visions would or would not convert Scrooge, they convert us. Whether or no the visions were evoked by real Spirits of the Past, Present, and Future, they were evoked by that truly exalted order of angels who are correctly called High Spirits. They are impelled and sustained by a quality which our contemporary artists ignore or almost deny, but which in a life decently lived is as normal and attainable as sleep, positive, passionate, conscious joy. The story sings from end to end like a happy man going home; and, like a happy and good man, when it cannot sing it yells. It is lyric and exclamatory, from the first exclamatory words of it. It is strictly a Christmas carol.

-Charles Dickens (1906)

An interesting find I came across today:

An Evening with Orson Welles is a series of six short films created in 1970 by Orson Welles, for the exclusive use of Sears, Roebuck & Co. Welles produced the recitations of popular stories for Sears's Avco Cartrivision machines, a pioneering home video system.[1]: 166  Five of the films are regarded as lost; footage from one, The Golden Honeymoon, is known to exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Evening_with_Orson_Welles

The reason it interests me is because one of the six short films was devoted to writings by G.K. Chesterton:

It even has an IMDB page:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11471996/

Now if only it wasn't lost....

[Mr. Edison] then goes on to deal with the origin of life; or rather, not to deal with it. The following statement is of such fearful intensity and importance that the interviewer prints it all in italics, and I will so reproduce it. "I believe the form of energy that we call life came to the earth from some other planet or at any rate from somewhere out in the great spaces beyond us." In short, there will henceforth be branded upon our brains the conviction that life came from somewhere, and probably under some conditions of space. But the suggestion that it came from another planet seems a rather weak evasion. Even a mind enfeebled by popular science would be capable of stirring faintly at that, and feeling unsatisfied. If it came from another planet, how did it arise on that planet? And in whatever way it arose on that planet, why could it not arise in that way on this planet? We are dealing with something admittedly unique and mysterious: like a ghost. The original rising of life from the lifeless is as strange as a rising from the dead. But this is like explaining a ghost walking visibly in the churchyard, by saying that it must have come from the churchyard of another village.

-May 3, 1924, Illustrated London News