Life & Wisdom Quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton

Chesterton skewers modernity with a trick he loved: praise that turns into a knife. “Science in the modern world has many uses” sounds like a reasonable concession to progress, the sort of fair-minded throat-clearing expected of a public intellectual. Then comes the pivot: the “chief use” of science isn’t discovery or cure, but a kind of rhetorical laundering for elites. The joke lands because it’s structured like a scientific claim - measured, comparative, almost clinical - while accusing science of being weaponized as PR.

The “long words” are doing double duty. They’re a swipe at jargon as social armor: technical language that intimidates laypeople into deference, or at least silence. But Chesterton’s real target is class power. “Errors of the rich” implies that wealth doesn’t just buy indulgence; it buys explanations. When industrial accidents, slum conditions, exploitative labor, or speculative finance produce predictable misery, the system rarely calls it moral failure. It calls it “market forces,” “efficiency,” “unintended consequences,” “necessary adjustment.” Long words convert culpability into inevitability.

Context matters: Chesterton writes from an early-20th-century Britain intoxicated by expertise, bureaucratic management, and the prestige of scientific authority, while inequality hardens. He’s not anti-science so much as anti-idolatry: suspicious of a culture that treats credentialed language as a substitute for accountability. The line works because it’s funny in the way cynicism can be funny: it names a recognizable social magic trick, the moment when a problem stops being a scandal and becomes a “complex issue,” safely handled by professionals who report, explain, and move on.