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.
Whatever you think someone else should give to you, you need to be able to give yourself first.
I praise God for you, sir: your reasons at dinner have been sharp and sententious; pleasant without scurrility, witty without affectation, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange with-out heresy.
The enlightened attention rejects nothing nor welcomes anything-like a mirror it responds equally to all.
Ideas are useless unless used. The proof of their value is in their implementation. Until then, they are in limbo.
It hurts not the tongue to give fair words.
O that men's ears should be To counsel deaf but not to flattery!
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