Shakespeare, living under the Tudors, who could (and did) kill anybody they wanted to kill, could write in a detached way about man who, “dressed in a little brief authority, plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep.” The modern elected politician is in theory dressed in even more brief authority. And, heaven knows, he plays fantastic tricks enough; not only to make the angels weep, but even possibly to make the angels laugh. And yet no poets or dramatists of the last hundred years ever wrote in that fashion about him....Nobody ever told politicians that they would be food for worms, even when the worms were almost indistinguishable from the politicians. That long, literary lamentation and protest against the powers of this world, which has gone on through the ages, and includes a thousand things from the Magnificat to Gulliver’s Travels, did in some strange way stop with the epoch of parliamentary rule, which was supposed to be popular rule. Of all the questions asked by hecklers at a political meeting to support a parliamentary candidate, I gravely and grievously doubt whether any man ever rose from the back benches, a sad and saturnine figure, to say: “Mr. Chairman, I should like to ask our candidate whether it has ever occurred to him that he will one day die.”

All this, I fear, will sound very fantastic in modern ears; and even especially in parliamentary ears, which are often rather long ears. But I do sincerely believe that it contains the essential point about the essential evil that has ruined parliamentary institutions, considered as popular institutions. That sort of optimism is alone enough to cut men off from common human happiness. All the old rulers of mankind, in one way or another, were steeped in this grand and tragic tradition. The king was constantly reminded that he would die; the priest existed to remind him that he would die; the soldier was, by hypothesis, a man permanently ready to die. But this sense of the mortal brotherhood of mortals in some way disappeared when the modern world began to teach brotherhood. Since that time every General Election has been regarded as a Last Judgment. Since then, every democratic experiment has been a New Deal. People were taught to look only to the future, or at least every part of it except their own future. They were taught never to look at the past, because the past had borne unbroken testimony to this element of time and change. And that is the real reason why the world has been, as they say just now, disappointed with democracy. There is no necessary depression or despair about democracy. What is depressing is optimism. There is nothing false in the idea of the equality of man; but there is something utterly false in denying the thing in which men are most obviously equal, which is death.

--As I Was Saying (1936)

I should have liked the ordinary, old-fashioned, obstinate people, who still stick to the notion of some connection between themselves and their own babies, to rise and bash in the heads of the inhuman prigs whose ideal is a sort of prophetic infanticide.

-The Well and the Shallows (1935)

It is upon this great and elemental weakness that all kings and aristocracies calculate. They divide men into classes and rule them.....any title that marks us out as something less than mankind, that alludes to our personal limits has something pleasing to all of us.

-December 18, 1909, (London) Daily News

I am almost tempted to say, well knowing that the remark will be wildly misunderstood, that one advantage of joining the Catholic Church is that you can for the first time forget it. I know very well, of course, that in the real sense it is never forgotten; but in this superficial and psychological, I had almost said in this neurotic sense, the paradox is perfectly true. It is true of the enemy of the religion, to whom it is horribly vivid. Men are not tied to the apron-strings of the Church, when they regard her as a mother, half so much as they are hag-ridden by her when they regard her as a hag...In that sense, comparatively speaking, I can really forget it. I forget it as a man forgets his own arms and legs; because he is using them and they are part of himself. But a man never forgets the leg he has lost. Still less can that unfortunate leg, cut off and wandering about the world by itself, ever forget the head and body whence it came.

-September 4, 1926 G.K.'s Weekly

Now, as a general truth, a man is no more to be trusted with a theory, to decide what prospective type of child ought to be brought into the world, than he is to be trusted with a loaded revolver to decide what sort of man ought to go out of the world. In this sense at least such a scientific hypothesis has something of the mystical character of murder.

-November 18, 1921, New Witness

When the first giraffe was described by travellers it was treated as a lie. Now it is in the Zoological Gardens; but it still looks like a lie.

October 28,1911, Illustrated London News

Dolly Parton and GKC

After hearing of Dolly Parton's passing today (RIP), I decided to Google "Dolly Parton" and "G.K. Chesterton", and came across this blog post concerning Dolly Parton's 2020 Netflix Christmas movie Christmas on the Square, which includes this line concerning the movie.

Parton wrote all 14 songs, and she even quotes G.K. Chesterton in one, saying, "Angels can fly, because they take themselves lightly."

UPDATE: Just discovered that you can actually hear her singing it in this trailer for the movie found on Youtube:

"Christmas on the Square" Trailer

Our great calamity to-day is the failure of words to bind...Everybody picks up a word when it helps him, and throws it away when it hinders him, without worrying about its truth or meaning...We shall not advance an inch in any of the arguments of to-day till people can be induced to see that a word can only be used as a spell, or even as a curse, so long as we keep it sacred.

-February 15, 1913, Illustrated London News

Gossip is a thing which for some reason or other is spoken of with an intonation of disdain. We have all read meditations by modern ladies and gentlemen, saying how sad and mysterious it is that the old women in the Whitechapel Road talk about their neighbours, and refuse to talk about culture or evolution. Yet the reason why they do not talk about culture and evolution but do talk about their neighbours is, after all, a very simple one. They do it because their neighbours are much more important a subject than culture or evolution. Long before anybody had ever heard of culture or evolution people had begun in the old primitive and religious phrase to consider their duty towards their neighbour. And one of our duties towards our neighbour is to talk about him.

It is hard for the average man to love his neighbour as he loves himself; but he had at least taken some step towards the Christian ideal if he can worry about his neighbour as he worries about himself. And it is entirely absurd of the modern education idealists to demand humanitarianism and yet discourage gossip. Gossip is the one really practical form of humanitarianism established securely in the world. It is the really practical, popular, and existing confession of human fraternity. These simple people, women especially, are accused of talking trivialities about people. How strangely blasphemous is the very idea and expression. How can there be any such thing as trivialities about People? How can we expect the landlady in Whitechapel to desert the really deep, complex, and intellectual problem of the lady next door for the sake of some lecturer's superficialities about Dante or Browning? No, my philanthropic friends, the poor will do justice to culture on the day that you do justice to gossip.

If, then, I say that such books as Mr. Fitzgerald's book on Dickens are gossip; it is not a thing to be condemned either from a moral or from an intellectual point of view. Gossip may be defined roughly as a continuous interest in all minor human matters. It is a refusal to 'mind one's own business'—that heathen and egotistical commandment.

-September 13, 1905, Daily News (London)

Sigrid Undset and GKC

Sigred Undset, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1928, and whose cause for canonization as a Catholic saint has recently been announced, was a great admirer of GKC, and even visited his home on one occasion. She also translated his masterpiece The Everlasting Man into Norweigan.

The Society of G.K. Chesterton has posted the Afterword to her translation of that book on its website:

Sigrid Undset's Afterword to The Everlasting Man

Vice President JD Vance quotes Chesterton

Bishop Barron recently interviewed Vice President J.D. Vance, in the course of which interview, the Vice President quoted GKC. (Well, technically, he quoted the famous "believe in anything" quotation which is often attributed to GKC, though it seems a paraphrase of two different passages from GKC)

https://youtu.be/aCpBXzEoG00?si=GGKPVJTGKLqgvI4-&t=2509

The vote is only a cheque that is sure to be dishonoured.

-May 15, 1913, New Witness