G.K. Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton was an early 20th century journalist who saw the fruit many modern philosophies would bear when they were just being born. He railed against eugenics, fascism, socialism, and practically anything else you can think of. He was also a distributist.
A heartwarming selection from GKC's Manalive! where a pessimist philosopher learns to appreciate life.
"Because I want almost anything that doesn't yet exist; because I want to turn a silent people into a singing people; because I would rejoice if a wineless country could be a wine-growing country; because I would change a world of wage-slaves into a world of freeholders; because I would have healthy employment instead of hideous unemployment; because I wish folk, now ruled by other people's fads, to be ruled by their own laws and liberties; because I hate the established dirt and hate more the established cleanliness; because, in short, I want to alter nearly everything there is, a cursed, haughty, high-souled, well-informed, world-worrying, sky-scraping, hair-splitting, head-splitting, academic animal of a common quill-driving social reformer gets up and calls me a Conservative! Excuse me!"
Assorted Quotations
Poetry
Songs of Education, a bittersweet poem.
By the Babe Unborn
The Donkey
A Ballade of Suicide
The Aristocrat
Some misinformed people have called him an anti-semite; click here for a general refutation of this point.
Chesterton titles from Barnes and Noble