Eugenics and Other Evils Quotes

“The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. it is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“The modern materialists are not permitted to doubt; they are forbidden to believe.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“It may be said of Socialism, therefore, that its friends recommended it as increasing equality, while its foes resisted it as decreasing liberty….The compromise eventually made was one of the most interesting and even curious cases in history. It was decided to do everything that had ever been denounced in Socialism, and nothing that had ever been desired in it…we proceeded to prove that it was possible to sacrifice liberty without gaining equality….In short, people decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“The modern world is insane, not so much because it admits the abnormal as because it cannot recover the normal.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

“The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statues, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen—that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the government will really help it to persecute its heretics…I am not frightened of the word ‘persecution’…It is a term of legal fact. If it means the imposition by the police of a widely disputed theory, incapable of final proof—then our priests are not now persecuting, but our doctors are.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“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 generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females"; say this to them and they will 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 face. 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.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“For the moral basis, it is obvious that man's ethical responsibility varies with his knowledge of consequences”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“ask yourself how many people you have met who grumbled at a thing as incurable, and how many who attacked it as curable? How many people we have heard abuse the British elementary schools, as they would abuse the British climate? How few have we met who realized that British education can be altered, but British weather cannot?...For a thousand that regret compulsory education, where is the hundred, or the ten, or the one, who would repeal compulsory education? …At the beginning of our epoch men talked with equal ease about Reform and Repeal. Now everybody talks about reform; nobody talks about repeal.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“I do not deny, but strongly affirm, the right of the State to interfere to cure a great evil. I say that in this case it would interfere to create a great evil; and I am not going to be turned from the discussion of that direct issue to bottomless botherations about Socialism and Individualism, or the relative advantages of always turning to the right and always turning to the left.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“The modern evil, we have said, greatly turns on this: that
people do not see that the exception proves the rule. Thus it may
or may not be right to kill a murderer; but it can only conceivably
be right to kill a murderer because it is wrong to kill a man.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“It is one thing to believe in witches, and quite another to believe in witch-smellers.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“Through all this modern muddle there runs the curious principle of sacrificing the ancient uses of things because they do not fit in with the modern abuses.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

“People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. It is no answer to say, with a distant optimism, that the scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“evil always takes advantage of ambiguity”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

“Many of the rich took to scepticism exactly as the poor took to drink; because it was a way out. But in any case, the man who had made a mistake not only refused to unmake it, but decided to go on making it. But in this he made yet another most amusing mistake, which was the beginning of all Eugenics.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

“We can no more analyse such peace in the soul than we can conceive in our heads the whole enormous and dizzy equilibrium by which, out of suns roaring like infernos and heavens toppling like precipices, He has hanged the world upon nothing.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State

“preliminary objectors into five sects; whom I will call the Euphemists, the Casuists, the Autocrats, the Precedenters, and the Endeavourers. When we have answered the immediate protestation of all these good, shouting, short-sighted people, we can begin to do justice to those intelligences that are really behind the idea.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

“The act of founding the family, I repeat, was an individual adventure outside the frontiers of the State.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

“Eugenics itself, in large quantities or small, coming quickly or coming slowly, urged from good motives or bad, applied to a thousand people or applied to three, Eugenics itself is a thing no more to be bargained about than poisoning.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

“The Eugenists' books and articles are full of suggestions that non-eugenic unions should and may come to be regarded as we regard sins; that we should really feel that marrying an invalid is a kind of cruelty to children.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

“Of course sane people always thought the aim of marriage was the procreation of children to the glory of God or according to the plan of Nature; but whether they counted such children as God's reward for service or Nature's premium on sanity, they always left the reward to God or the premium to Nature,”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

“It is not really difficult to sum up the essence of Eugenics: though some of the Eugenists seem to be rather vague about it.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

“there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

“sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

“Whether they gave the rack half a turn or half a hundred, they were, by hypothesis, dealing with a truth which they knew to be there. Whether they vivisect painfully or painlessly, they are trying to find out whether the truth is there or not. The old Inquisitors tortured to put their own opinions into somebody. But the new Inquisitors torture to get their own opinions out of him. They do not know what their own opinions are, until the victim of vivisection tells them. The division of thought is a complete chasm for anyone who cares about thinking. The old persecutor was trying to teach the citizen, with fire and sword. The new persecutor is trying to learn from the citizen, with scalpel and germ-injector. The master was meeker than the pupil will be.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State