Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes
People decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.
It is the first law of practical courage. To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school.
Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street.
Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things–pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people.
The old assumption of the approximate impossibility of war really rested on a similar assumption about the impossibility of evil-and especially of evil in high places.
'As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it'; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.
We are like the penny, because we have the image of the king stamped on us, the divine king.
The long words are not the hard words, it is the short words that are hard. There is much more metaphysical subtlety in the word "damn" than in the word "degeneration."
In all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.
This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities.
Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake.
To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea.
Price is a crazy and incalculable thing, while Value is an intrinsic and indestructible thing.
There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trade Unions.
Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has certain advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work.
The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.
There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally.
Just the other day in the Underground I enjoyed the pleasure of offering my seat to three ladies.
Some of the most frantic lies on the face of life are told with modesty and restraint; for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint will save them.
The mind that finds its way to wild places is the poet's; but the mind that never finds its way back is the lunatic's.
Mankind is not a tribe of animals to which we owe compassion. Mankind is a club to which we owe our subscription.
People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.
Gratitude produced the most purely joyful moments that have been known to man.
Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.
The trouble with Christianity is, not that its failed, but that it's never been tried . . . not that it can't remake the world, but that it's difficult.
The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger.
There is no obligation on us to be richer, or busier, or more efficient, or more productive, or more progressive, or any way worldlier or wealthier, if it does not make us happier.
The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work.
He is only a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the Conservative.
A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter.
None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them.
Circumstances break men's bones; it has never been shown that they break men's optimism.
Evil always wins through the strength of its splendid dupes; and there has in all ages been a disastrous alliance between abnormal innocence and abnormal sin.
By all men bond to Nothing, Being slaves without a lord, By one blind idiot world obeyed, Too blind to be abhorred.
Only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticize the State. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city.
