Quotes About Quotes

A reader who browses through the fourteenth edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations will learn on page 918 that the General Motors pavilion at the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago ("A Century of Progress") was inscribed with this quotation from Tremendous Trifles (slightly misquoted): "The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder." On the next page of Bartlett's, readers are told that in a notebook dated 1945, John F. Kennedy ascribed to Chesterton the following: "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up." This alludes to the idea expressed by Chesterton in the opening paragraph of "The Drift from Domesticity," which is chapter IV of The Thing.