"...it is generally the man who is not ready to argue, who is ready to sneer."

Anyhow, one of the real disadvantages of the great and glorious sport, that is called argument, is its inordinate length. If you argue honestly, as St. Thomas always did, you will find that the subject sometimes seems as if it would never end. He was strongly conscious of this fact, as appears in many places; for instance his argument that most men must have a revealed religion, because they have not time to argue. No time, that is, to argue fairly. There is always time to argue unfairly; not least in a time like ours. Being himself resolved to argue, to argue honestly, to answer everybody, to deal with everything, he produced books enough to sink a ship or stock a library; though he died in comparatively early middle age. Probably he could not have done it at all, if he had not been thinking even when he was not writing; but above all thinking combatively. This, in his case, certainly did not mean bitterly or spitefully or uncharitably; but it did mean combatively. As a matter of fact, it is generally the man who is not ready to argue, who is ready to sneer. That is why, in recent literature, there has been so little argument and so much sneering.

-St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox (1933)

"I do not like seriousness. I think it is irreligious."

I do not like seriousness. I think it is irreligious. Or, if you prefer the phrase, it is the fashion of all false religions. The man who takes everything seriously is the man who makes an idol of everything: he bows down to wood and stone until his limbs are as rooted as the roots of the tree or his head as fallen as the stone sunken by the roadsite. It has often been discussed whether animals can laugh. The hyena is said to laugh, but it is rather in the sense in which the M.P. is said to utter "an ironical cheer." At the best, the hyena utters an ironical laugh. Broadly, it is true that all animals except Man are serious.

-The Uses of Diversity (1921)

"I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them."

Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the same thing. Say to them "The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generations does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females?"; say this to them and they sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them "Murder your mother," and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same. Say to them "It is not improbable that a period may arrive when the narrow if once useful distinction between the anthropoid homo and the other animals, which has been modified on so many moral points, may be modified also even in regard to the important question of the extension of human diet"; say this to them, and beauty born of murmuring sound will pass into their faces. But say to them, in a simple, manly, hearty way "Let's eat a man!" and their surprise is quite surprising. Yet the sentences say just the same thing.

-Eugenics and Other Evils (1922)

"...those who worship the intellect and those who use it."

What we call the intellectual world is divided into two types of people- those who worship the intellect and those who use it. There are exceptions; but, broadly speaking, they are never the same people.

-The Thing (1929)

Short quotes

[I've decided to make another "short quotes list", consisting of fairly short quotes by GKC, to keep them all in one place, like I did once before with a list of 50 such quotes. However, instead of trying to come up with many at one time, like I did before, I have decided simply to include them in this post as I come across them. So expect this list to be updated from time to time].

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
-The Defendant (1901)

"It is a very good thing...to be frequently married again- always, of course, to the same person."
-Illustrated London News, October 9, 1909,

"The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of 500 yards I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man."
-Chesterton as Seen by His Contemporaries (quoted in)

"Brave men are vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle."
-Tremendous Trifles (1909)

"When men really understand that they are brothers they instantly begin to fight"
-Utopia of Userers (1917)

"The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more."
-Orthodoxy (1908)

"Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind."
-Orthodoxy (1908)

"I have little doubt that when St. George had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess."
-The Victorian Age in Literature (1913 )

"Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling."
-Tremendous Trifles (1909)

"...there is no hope for men who do not boast that their wives bully them."
-Alarms and Discusions (1910)

"Greek heroes do not grin: but gargoyles do -- because they are Christian ."
-Orthodoxy (1908)

"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all."
-The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of pleasure"
-Twelve Types (1902)

"...we lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves."
-The Defendant (1901)

"Have we really learnt to think more broadly? Or have we only learn to spread our thoughts thinner?"
-Twelve Types (1902)

"The Bible must be referring to wallpapers, I think, when it says, 'Use not vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do.' "
-Tremendous Trifles (1909)

"Being educated means reading the newspapers. Being properly educated means not believing newspapers after you have read them."
-Boston Globe (quoted in)

"Experts in poverty (by which I do not mean sociologists, but poor men)..."
-Illustrated London News, March 25, 1911

"A real soldier does not fight because he has something that he hates in front of him. He fights because he has something that he loves behind his back."
-Illustrated London News, January 14, 1911

"A lot of men....could go on saying for days that something ought to be done...But if you convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do it."
-The Secret of Father Brown (1927)

"For the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn't keep his word"
-"The Aristocrat" (1912)

"My last American tour consisted of inflicting no less than ninety-nine lectures on people who never did me any harm"
-Autobiography (1936)

"Men, they say, are now imitating angels; in their flying-machines, that is: not in any other respect that I have heard of."
-Alarms and Discursions (1910)

"The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it."
-All Things Considered (1908)

"...I use the word humanitarian in the ordinary sense, as meaning one who upholds the claims of all creatures against those of humanity."
-Orthodoxy (1908)

"Daybreak is a never-ending glory, getting out of bed is a never-ending nuisance."
-The Apostle and the Wild Ducks (book essays collected in 1975)

"...God Himself will not help us to ignore evil, but only to defy and to defeat it."
-Illustrated London News, April 14, 1917

"For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value in any of them is that they bear the image of the King."
-Charles Dickens (1906)

-"Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously."
-Illustrated London News, December 2, 1905

"Simple and uneducated people have no horror of physical monstrosities; just as educated people have no horror of moral monstrosities"
-Illustrated London News, December 16, 1905

"I gravely doubt whether women were ever married by capture. I think they pretended to be; as they do still."
-What's Wrong With the World (1910)

"Common sense, that extinct branch of pyschology..."
-Sidelights on New London and Newer York (1932)

"If the characters are not wicked, the book is."
-All Things Considered (1908)

"To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence."
-A Miscellany of Men (1912)

P.G. Wodehouse references to GKC

P.G. Wodehouse introduced Chesterton into his fiction in a couple of humurous references. For instance, from Mr Mullner Speaking:

At that moment, however, the drowsy stillness of the summer afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G.K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.

Another Wodehouse reference to Chesterton is found in The Clicking of Cuthbert.

"Flesho!" cried Mrs. Jane Jukes Jopp triumphantly. "I've been trying to remember the name all the afternoon. I saw about it one of the papers. The advertisements speak most highly of it. You take it before breakfast and again before retiring, and they guarantee it to produce firm, healthy flesh on the most sparsely-covered limbs in next to no time. Now, will you remember to get a bottle tonight? It comes in two sizes, the five-shilling (or large size) and the smaller at half-a-crown. G.K. Chesterton writes that he used it regularly for years."

"...I mean an ancient, healthy, capricious despot, not a miserable, modern official trembling in the middle of all the telephones of Europe..."

If I were a despot (I mean an ancient, healthy, capricious despot, not a miserable, modern official trembling in the middle of all the telephones of Europe) I should be strongly inclined not to suppress certain beliefs, but to suppress certain words. I do not mean terms of abuse; those I might even encourage. I mean certain phrases which are used as terms of abuse, but also convey the impression of having some precise ethical or scientific meaning, when, as a fact, they have practically no meaning at all. I would allow my Prime Minister to call the Leader of the Opposition a traitor. For that is a precise term with a fixed moral meaning, and the other man might bring an action or a big stick. But I would not allow the Prime Minister to call him a Pro-Boer; because that is a phrase meanly selected for its doubtfulness and double-meaning; it might imply anything from pitying a Dutch widow to living on Kruger's bank-notes. Similarly I would permit my Court Prophet to tell my Court Priest that he was telling blasphemous lies. But I could not permit him to tell the priest that he was enunciating out-worn dogmas; for that is trying to discredit a man without really saying anything intelligble about him. I should allow the people to call my Commander-in-chief a murderer, but not to call him a "militarist." I should permit (nay, encourage) a journalist to be called silly, but not to be called paradoxical. After a few years of my severe but beneficient reign words that have wholly lost any working meaning might almost have withered out of the land, and the English race might have begun to think once more.

-January 30, 1909, Illustrated London News

"They may continue to war with it, but it will be as they war with nature; as they war with the landscape, as they war with the skies."

This is the final fact, and it is the most extraordinary of all. The faith has not only often died but it has often died of old age. It has not only been often killed but it has often died a natural death; in the sense of coming to a natural and necessary end. It is obvious that it has survived the most savage and the most universal persecutions from the shock of the Diocletian fury to the shock of the French Revolution. But it has a more strange and even a more weird tenacity; it has survived not only war but peace. It has not only died often but degenerated often and decayed often; it has survived its own weakness and even its own surrender. We need not repeat what is so obvious about the beauty of the end of Christ in its wedding of youth and death. But this is almost as if Christ had lived to the last possible span, had been a white-haired sage of a hundred and died of natural decay, and then had risen again rejuvenated, with trumpets and the rending of the sky. It was said truly enough that human Christianity in its recurrent weakness was sometimes too much wedded to the powers of the world; but if it was wedded it has very often been widowed. It is a strangely immortal sort of widow. An enemy may have said at one moment that it was but an aspect of the power of the Caesars; and it sounds as strange to-day as to call it an aspect of the Pharaohs. An enemy might say that it was the official faith of feudalism; and it sounds as convincing now as to say that it was bound to perish with the ancient Roman villa. All these things did indeed run their course to its normal end; and there seemed no course for the religion but to end with them. It ended and it began again.

'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.' The civilisation of antiquity was the whole world: and men no more dreamed of its ending than of the ending of daylight. They could not imagine another order unless it were in another world. The civilisation of the world has passed away and those words have not passed away. In the long night of the Dark Ages feudalism was so familiar a thing that no man could imagine himself without a lord: and religion was so woven into that network that no man would have believed they could be torn asunder. Feudalism itself was torn to rags and rotted away in the popular life of the true Middle Ages; and the first and freshest power in that new freedom was the old religion. Feudalism had passed away, and the words did not pass away. The whole medieval order, in many ways so complete and almost cosmic a home for man, wore out gradually in its turn and here at least it was thought that the words would die. They went forth across the radiant abyss of the Renaissance and in fifty years were using all its light and learning for new religious foundations, new apologetics, new saints. It was supposed to have been withered up at last in the dry light of the Age of Reason; it was supposed to have disappeared ultimately in the earthquake of the Age of Revolution. Science explained it away; and it was still there. History disinterred it in the past; and it appeared suddenly in the future. To-day it stands once more in our path; and even as we watch it, it grows.

If our social relations and records retain their continuity, if men really learn to apply reason to the accumulating facts of so crushing a story, it would seem that sooner or later even its enemies will learn from their incessant and interminable disappointments not to look for anything so simple as its death. They may continue to war with it, but it will be as they war with nature; as they war with the landscape, as they war with the skies. 'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.' They will watch for it to stumble; they will watch for it to err; they will no longer watch for it to end. Insensibly, even unconsciously, they will in their own silent anticipations fulfil the relative terms of that astounding prophecy; they will forget to watch for the mere extinction of what has so often been vainly extinguished; and will learn instinctively to look first for the coming of the comet or the freezing of the star.

-The Everlasting Man (1925)

Clarence Darrow

Chesterton debated many people during his lifetime, including (of course) George Bernard Shaw, as well as H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, etc.

One of the people whom Chesterton debated a couple times was Clarence Darrow. Given their greatly different viewpoints, and the fact that (unlike Chesterton's relationship with Shaw and Wells), they were not close personal friends (Darrow living in America, of course), it is interesting to read Darrow's tribute to GKC.

"I was favorably impressed by, warmly attached to, G.K. Chesterton. I enjoyed my debates with him, and found him a man of culture and fine sensibilities. If he and I had lived where we could have become better acquainted, eventually we would have ceased to debate, I firmly believe."

[Source- Chesterton as Seen by His Contemporaries, Cyril Clemens (1939), p. 68]

"The case against them simply is that when they legislate for all men, they always omit themselves."

The evil of aristocracy is not that it necessarily leads to the infliction of bad things or the suffering of sad ones; the evil of aristocracy is that it places everything in the hands of a class of people who can always inflict what they can never suffer. Whether what they inflict is, in their intention, good or bad, they become equally frivolous. The case against the governing class of modern England is not in the least that it is selfish; if you like, you may call the English oligarchs too fantastically unselfish. The case against them simply is that when they legislate for all men, they always omit themselves.

-Heretics (1905)

"For this is the second death of the gods- a death after resurrection. And when a ghost dies, it dies eternally."

From a review for the Bookman (December 1899), describing the seventeenth-century French painter Nicolas Poussin.

It was one of Chesterton's earliest writings, written when he was 25.

When paganism was re-throned at the Renaissance, it proved itself for the first time a religion by the sign that only its own worshippers could slay it. It has taken them three centuries, but they have thrashed it threadbare. Just as poets invoked Mars and Venus, for every trivial flirtation, so Poussin and his school multiplied nymphs and satyrs with the recurrence of an endless wall-paper, till a bacchanal has become as respectable as a bishop and the god of love is too vulgar for a valentine...This is the root of the strange feeling of sadness evoked by the groups and landscapes of Poussin. We are looking at one of the dead loves of the world. Never were men born so much out of the time as the modern neo-pagans. For this is the second death of the gods- a death after resurrection. And when a ghost dies, it dies eternally.

Another GKC reference in a Dean Koontz novel

Another Chesterton reference in a Dean Koontz novel. From his novel What the Night Knows, this passage:

Across her desk spilled glossy magazines published for teenagers and, by way of implausible contrast, a paperback of The Everlasting Man, by G.K. Chesterton.

[BTW, I plan on getting back to quoting actual passages from GKC himself soon.]