Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism.

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Whenever you remove any fence, always pause long enough to ask why it was put there in the first place.

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The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger.

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A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.

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It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.

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Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Men Quotes , Animal Quotes

The sceptic ultimately undermines democracy (1) because he can see no significance in death and such things of a literal equality; (2) because he introduces different first principles, making debate impossible: and debate is the life of democracy; (3) because the fading of the images of sacred persons leaves a man too prone to be a respecter of earthly persons; (4) because there will be more, not less, respect for human rights if they can be treated as divine rights.

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One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created.

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Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

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Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

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Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

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Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.

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The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

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If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.

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If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Moving Quotes , Christian Inspirational Quotes

We have not made cricket and football [soccer] professional because of any astonishing avarice or new vulgarity. We have made them professional because we would have them perfect. We have dedicated men to them as to some god of inhuman excellence. We care more for football than for the fun of playing football.

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Tolerance is the virtue of those who don't believe anything.

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If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments

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Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street.

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I never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one. When people talked about the fall of man, they knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't understand. Now they talk about the survival of the fittest: they think they do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Philosophy Quotes , Fall Quotes