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.
It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself-to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed and then to find yourself still in bed.
What if we choose not to do the things we are supposed to do? The principal gain is a sense of an authentic act - and an authentic life. It may be a short one, but it is an authentic one, and that's a lot better than those short lives full of boredom. The principal loss is security. Another is respect from the community. But you gain the respect of another community, the one that is worth having the respect of.
Disgust is often more deeply buried than envy and anger, but it compounds and intensifies the other negative emotions.
In matters of religion, it is very easy to deceive a man and very hard to undeceive him.
Life at court does not satisfy a man, but it keeps him from being satisfied with anything else.
Hell is not fire and brimstone, not a place where you are punished for lying or cheating or stealing. Hell is wanting to be something and somewhere different from where you are.
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