Some more interesting quotations

A note: these are all from our Uncle Gilbert, and apply to technology, engineering, science...

"I have often thanked God for the telephone..." What's Wrong With the World CW4:112

"It may be easier to get chocolate for nothing out of a shopkeeper than out of an automatic machine. But if you did manage to steal the chocolate, the automatic machine would be much less likely to run after you." The Ball and the Cross

"No machine can lie," said Father Brown, "nor can it tell the truth." The Wisdom of Father Brown

"The rebuilding of this bridge between science and human nature is one of the greatest needs of mankind." The Defendant

"We have to go on using the Greek name of amber as the only name of electricity because we have no notion what is the real name or nature of electricity." The Common Man

"The Eastern says fate governs everything and he sits and looks pretty; we believe in Free-will and Predestination and we invent Babbage's Calculating Machine." (GKC quoted in Maisie Ward's Gilbert Keith Chesterton)

"I like the Cyclostyle ink; it is so inky. I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. It is just the same with people.... When we call a man "manly" or a woman "womanly" we touch the deepest philosophy." (from a letter to Frances Blogg quoted in Maisie Ward's Gilbert Keith Chesterton)

I live in an age of varied powers and knowledge,
Of steam, science, democracy, journalism, art
But when my love rises like a sea,
I have to go back to an obscure tribe and a slain man
To formulate a blessing.
[CW10:30]

To the child the tree and the lamp-post are as natural and as artificial as each other; or rather, neither of them are natural but both supernatural. For both are splendid and unexplained. The flower with which God crowns the one, and the flame with which Sam the lamplighter crowns the other, are equally of the gold of fairy-tales. In the middle of the wildest fields the most rustic child is, ten to one, playing at steam-engines. And the only spiritual or philosophical objection to steam-engines is not that men pay for them or work at them, or make them very ugly, or even that men are killed by them; but merely that men do not play at them. The evil is that the childish poetry of clockwork does not remain. The wrong is not that engines are too much admired, but that they are not admired enough. The sin is not that engines are mechanical, but that men are mechanical.
Heretics CW1:112-113