Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.
Interpretation
This quote critiques how science is often used to obscure the failures and faults of the wealthy.
In this quote, Gilbert K. Chesterton suggests that while science brings numerous benefits to society, one of its most significant roles has been to create complex terminology that can be used to mask the mistakes and incompetencies of the affluent class. This reflects a broader commentary on how the elite may manipulate knowledge and language to justify their actions and maintain their status, rather than addressing the underlying issues.
In practice
In a discussion about the role of science in society, one might quote Chesterton to highlight how language can obscure truths.
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.
Competing is intense among humans, and within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals.
Cheats, liars and criminals may resist every blandishment while respectable gentlemen have been moved to appalling treasons by watery cabbage in a departmental canteen.
There is no beauty in the finest cloth if it makes hunger and unhappiness.
I have always sought to guide the future-but it is very lonely sometimes trying to play God.
The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
You can be as exclusive as you want to in your house, but once you walk outside your house, you have to realize that it's not your world anymore: it's all of our world.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.