Book//mark – Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays | G.K. Chesterton,1917
G.K. Chesterton / Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays, 1917
“In all popular narratives, the king, if he is a wicked king, is generally also a wizard. Now there is a very vital human truth enshrined in this. Bad government, like good government, is a spiritual thing. Even the tyrant never rules by force alone; but mostly by fairy tales. And so it is with the modern tyrant, the great employer. The sight of a millionaire is seldom, in the ordinary sense, an enchanting sight: nevertheless he is in his way an enchanter a fascinating personality. So is a snake. At least he is fascinating to rabbits; and so is the millionaire to the rabbit-witted people that ladies and gentlemen have allowed themselves to become.”
“Informer’ means one who gives information. It means what ‘journalist’ ought to mean. The only difference is that the Common Informer may be paid if he tells the truth. The common journalist will be ruined if he does.”
“The key fact in the new development of plutocracy is that it will use its own blunder as an excuse for further crimes. Everywhere the very completeness of the impoverishment will be made a reason for the enslavement; though the men who impoverished were the same who enslaved. And the most monstrous feature in this enormous meanness may be noted in the plutocratic appeal to science, or, rather, to the pseudo-science that they call Eugenics.”
“Capitalist society, which naturally does not know the meaning of honor, cannot know the meaning of disgrace.”
“There will be no art that might not just as well be advertisement.”
“Employers will give time to eat, time to sleep; they are in terror of a time to think”
“I will put before you one plain question. There are some pleasures of the poor that may also mean profits for the rich: there are other pleasures of the poor which cannot mean profits for the rich? Watch this one contrast, and you will watch the whole creation of a careful slavery.”
“What happens when everyone is asleep is called Evolution. What happens when everyone is awake is called Revolution.”
“The new community which the capitalists are now constructing will be a very complete and absolute community; and one which will tolerate nothing really independent of itself.”
G.K. Chesterton, Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays, 1917
Also:
Book//mark – The Man Who Was Thursday | G. K. Chesterton (1908)
The Donkey | A poem by G.K. Chesterton, 1900
On [:] Quality | G.K. Chesterton, 1910
