It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the morality of wealth accumulation and the societal view of poverty and wealth.
In this quote, Gilbert K. Chesterton highlights the discomfort many people feel when witnessing the wealthy's insatiable desire for more wealth, in contrast to the desperate requests for help from the poor. Chesterton suggests that while society tends to look down on those in poverty, it should be more concerned about the greed that drives the rich to continually seek more money, especially through advertisements that promote consumption.
In practice
In a discussion about economic inequality at a community meeting.
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.
The Establishment Clause prohibits government from making adherence to a religion relevant in any way to a person's standing in the political community.
Every man has his folly, but the greatest folly of all β¦ is not to have one.
The purpose of life is undoubtedly to know oneself. We cannot do it unless we learn to identify ourselves with all that lives. The sum-total of that life is God.
I believe in goodness, mercy and charity. I believe in casting bread upon the waters.
The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this; What is the use of climbing Mount Everest? and my answer must at once be, it is no use. There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever.
Get into the habit of dealing with God about everything.
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