Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that claiming to be impartial often disguises a lack of concern or understanding.
Gilbert K. Chesterton's quote critiques the concept of impartiality, declaring it as a fancy term for a lack of interest or commitment to knowledge and understanding. He implies that pretending to be neutral can often lead to ignorance, as it allows one to avoid taking a stand or engaging with important issues.
In practice
In a discussion about social justice, one might quote this to emphasize the importance of active engagement rather than neutrality.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
Think of a flabby person covered with layers of fat. That is what your mind can become - flabby, covered with layers of fat till it becomes too dull and lazy to think, to observe, to explore, to discover ... not wanting to be disturbed or questioned into wakefulness.
The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful is the cause of half their errors.
Deep in the soul, below pain, below all the distraction of life, is a silence vast and grand - an infinite ocean of calm, which nothing can disturb; Nature's own exceeding peace, which "passes understanding". That which we seek with passionate longing, here and there, upward and outward; we find at last within ourselves.
I have learned that as long as I hold fast to my beliefs and values - and follow my own moral compass - then the only expectations I need to live up to are my own.
If we slide into a pattern of just thinking about today, we'll end up reacting to yesterday instead of shaping something more constructive in the world.
Whosoever is determined to seek guidance and follow a path of right conduct must search for a shaykh from amongst those who have realization, one who follows a path methodically, who has abandoned his passions, and who has firmly established his feet in the service of his Lord.
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