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.
Forgetfulness, and I would even say historical error, are essential in the creation of a nation.
Life holds one great but quite commonplace mystery. Though shared by each of us and known to all, seldom rates a second thought. That mystery, which most of us take for granted and never think twice about, is time. Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem as eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it. Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.
I do not believe that civilizations have to die because civilization is not an organism. It is a product of wills.
Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.
Every creature is a glittering, glistening mirror of Divinity.
You, darkness, of whom I am born- I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes the rest.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.