G. K. Chesterton

“ We do not care what becomes of the man; we feel that he and the moon monsters are both about as basically heartless and dreary as each other. This is a real misfortune, or punishment of the sceptical attitude, for you cannot write a romance or a story of adventure without human interest. The common modern notion that a romance is simply a string of brute incidents, fights, voyages, and discoveries, is an error which is responsible for cart-loads of bad imitations of Dumas and Scott. ”

“ But though the arguments of John Chinaman furnish to the liberal mind no reason for despising the civilisation of Europe, they do furnish an excellent set of reasons for abandoning the brutal and babyish habit of despising the civilisation of China. John Chinaman exaggerates, no doubt, but exaggeration is often a very good proof of honesty. The test of a truth is that it is a thing that may be safely exaggerated. Try to exaggerate a falsehood, and every one will see what a monster you have set up.
Works on the philosophy and romance of history have been common in many quarters lately. ”

“ The First Men in the Moon fails, in spite of a wealth of world-wide fancy and gigantesque logic, for lack of that one feeling which one of the older and more humane romances would have made us feel—the feeling of man returning after his nightmare of space and finding this common earth glowing all round him like a fire-lit room. ”

“ If a member of what we commonly regard as the intellectual classes had met Russell of Killowen in private life, he would probably have thought him a very ordinary man of the world, whose conversation was compounded of that of a trainer, a tipster, a card-player, and a bon vivant, But if that intellectual gentleman had been suddenly pitted against Russell in a struggle for a nation's destiny or a man's life, he would soon have discovered whereabouts on the field were the big guns of the intellect. ”

“ H. G. Wells's conception of future generations, however grotesque and even loathsome may be his vision of the commonwealths of another planet, the actual people of the great empire of China are to us more ghostly than the unborn generations and more wild than the men in the moon. The Letters of John Chinaman constitute an astonishingly spirited and remarkably able protest on behalf of the idea that Chinese civilisation is, morally, intellectually, and materially, immeasurably superior to our own. ”

“ Among a thousand other values the life of a man like Lord Russell is valuable if it reminds us of this—of how shallow,upon the whole, are the pretensions of the cultivated class to represent the intellect of the nation. ”

“ They all represent the future condition of mankind as a state. The condition of mankind never has been, and probably never will be, a state. It has always been a change, and, to the people engaged in it, an exciting change.
It is solemnly said that this is a transition period; but the whole history of humanity has been one continual transition period. ”

“ It was no longer a matter of brutal men animated more or less by large ideas, as in the Middle Ages, but of brutal men animated by nothing but their own exquisite and undiluted brutality. And it is very strange that Scotch men should have taken such a fancy to defending Mary Queen of Scots, for she was in every respect the antithesis of the Scotch character. Generations of the most wholesome nation on the earth have wasted their time in defending one spiteful, sensual, degenerate French vixen. ”

“ A set of adventures is nothing unless we have first gained a working and approximate human interest in the adventurer. He may be stabbed by his rival, or betrayed by his lady-love, or drowned in a storm, or killed in a man-trap, and we shall do nothing but call the watch together and thank God we are rid of a bore. ”

“ They are beings like walking toadstools or horribly magnified animalcula; beings with heads like huge bubbles, which grow bigger as they think; beings who divide among themselves the senses and the powers of man, who have one specialist to see and another specialist to hear, and another specialist to count The weakness of the book is that of nearly all Mr. H. G. Wells's books, and it arises out of his sceptical attitude. As a human story it is lifeless. The men who conduct the expedition are as distant, as monstrous, and as cold as the wan populace of the moon. ”

“ The longer I live the more convinced I am that the only two things that really count in national existence, are a succession of writers of genius and the proud memories of great, noble, and honourable deeds. ”

“ For example, he urges one point in favour of the Chinese against the Western civilisation which struck me as decidedly forcible. The Chinese civilisation, he points out, is a moral civilisation—that is to say, it does organise all power, all property, and all life in accordance with certain ethical ideas, right or wrong, which were taught by Confucius. Their civilisation is, in short, Confucian; but our civilisation is not Christian. Christianity remains the one really inspiring ideal which can induce us to soften and beautify the mechanical action of our society. ”

“ H. G. Wells is, of course, a profoundly interesting and representative man of this age. The conception at the back of his mind appears to be essentially the same as that of Swift. Swift, in "Gulliver's Travels," sought to show how, by merely altering the standards and proportions of life, by conceiving a hypothetical man forty feet high, and another hypothetical man five inches high, you could make the whole position of humanity ridiculous, and confound all the principles of heaven and earth. ”

“ It is remarkable that of all the interesting books of the last month hardly any have been novels. Fiction is indeed only represented by two very distinguished men, and even these are not altogether at their best. ”

“ Man will not rest in the Eden of William Morris any more than he rested in the Eden of the Book of Genesis. The simple pagan villages of "News from Nowhere" will be convulsed by the rumour that a man has arisen who claims to unite earth and heaven. ”

“ The great and delightful thing about human existence is that it has been engaged from the beginning of time in one everlasting crisis. Humanity went to bed every night expecting to wake up and find itself divine. The whole of history is the vigil of a festival. This is, I think, the essential error which gives that strange air of unreality, even of a kind of spectral horror, to all the Utopias which are now written about the ultimate condition of men. Men a thousand years hence may have the institutions of Mr. H. G. Wells, or the institutions of Mr. ”

“ The cant notion runs that the lawyer is a man with no sympathies, who can in consequence take any side of any question. It is forgotten that it is also possible for him to be a man of so many sympathies that he can take any side of any question. This was certainly the case with Russell, the last of the great line of Irish advocates. ”

“ He maintains, with a great deal of plausibility and truth, that we are more and more moving away from the scheme of government as administered by our present governing classes, and that the control of the future will almost certainly be in the hands of a scientific and serious class of what may be called middle-class mechanics. ”

“ Barry O'Brien tells us many things about him which give food for thought about this singular intellectual type. In a world, for example, where "intellectual" is always taken as meaning "literary," it is significant to read that for all practical purposes Russell of Killowen never opened a book. ”

“ But whatever their institutions are, the essential point is that they will not live by those institutions or in those institutions; they will live in some direct and practical excitement about the approaching appearance of the kingdom of God. ”