Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch.

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Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex (female) superiority that even the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father.

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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.

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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.

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A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes.

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If an editor can only make people angry enough, they will write half his newspaper for him for nothing.

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The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men…In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized society groups come into existence founded upon sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique.

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It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense.

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Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.

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The old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it. Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed.

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None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them.

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Men spoke much in my boyhood about restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it's a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.

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Freethinkers are occasionally thoughtful, though never free.

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The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

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Most Americans ... have a sort of permanent intoxication from within, a sort of invisible champagne.

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There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. Nothing is more keenly required than a defence of bores. When Byron divided humanity into the bores and bored, he omitted to notice that the higher qualities exist entirely in the bores, the lower qualities in the bored, among whom he counted himself. The bore, by his starry enthusiasm, his solemn happiness, may, in some sense, have proved himself poetical. The bored has certainly proved himself prosaic.

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Leisure is being allowed to do nothing.

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But since he stood for England And knew what England means, Unless you give him bacon You must not give him beans.

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And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they have no graves as yet.

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The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world... The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us.

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