Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

The modern mind will accept nothing on authority, but will accept anything on no authority. Say that the Bible or the Pope says so and it will be dismissed without further examination. But preface your remark with "I think I heard somewhere," or, try but fail to remember the name of some professor who might have said "such-and-such," and it will be immediately accepted as an unshakable fact.

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Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it.

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One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.

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Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

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Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.

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of being strong and brave. The strong can not be brave. Only the weak can be brave; and yet again, in practice, only those who can be brave can be trusted, in time of doubt, to be strong.

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According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.

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The big corporation is not in the least remarkable for efficiency; it is only too big to be blamed for its inefficiency.

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Because our expression is imperfect we need friendship to fill up the imperfections.

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Marriage halves our griefs, doubles our joys, and quadruples our expenses

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A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a woman.

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Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.

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[No society can survive the socialist] fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them.

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It is cold anarchy to say that all men are to meddle in all men'smarriages. It is cold anarchy to say that any doctor may seize andsegregate anyone he likes. But it is not anarchy to say that a fewgreat hygienists might enclose or limit the life of all citizens,as nurses do with a family of children. It is not anarchy, it istyranny; but tyranny is a workable thing.

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The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.

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A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason

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People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

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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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All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

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Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic's, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man.

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