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.
Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony
. . . [The Judicial Branch] may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.
The definition of morality: Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents having the hidden desire to revenge themselves upon life - and being successful.
The 'free-floating intellectual' may occupy himself with problems because of their inherent interest and importance, perhaps to little effect.
I was trained to be an actor, not a star. I was trained to play roles, not to deal with fame and agents and lawyers and the press.
The only thing harder than getting a new idea into the military mind is to get an old one out.
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