Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Literary men are being employed to praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only find political reasons for the commercial schemes that they have done for some time past they also find moral defences for the commercial schemers... I do resent the whole age of patronage being revived under such absurd patrons; and all poets becoming court poets, under kings that have taken no oath.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Kings Quotes , Taken Quotes

By all men bond to Nothing, Being slaves without a lord, By one blind idiot world obeyed, Too blind to be abhorred.

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

Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.

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Where does a wise man kick a pebble? On the beach. Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest.

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The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not); it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them.

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Meaninglessness does not come from being weary of pain. Meaninglessness comes from being weary of pleasure.

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For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value of any of them is that they bear the image of the king.

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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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We do not want, as the newspapers say, a church that will move with the world. We want a church that will move the world.

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Christianity, whatever else it is, is an explosion. Unless it is sensational there is simply no sense in it. Unless the Gospel sounds like a gun going off it has not been uttered at all.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Gun Quotes , Sound Quotes

The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Sadness Quotes , World Quotes

Excuse me if I enjoy myself rather obviously! I don't often have the luck to have a dream like this. It is new to me for a nightmare to lead me to a lobster. It is commonly the other way.

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Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

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Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.

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There are arguments for atheism, and they do not depend, and never did depend, upon science. They are arguable enough, as far as they go, upon a general survey of life; only it happens to be a superficial survey of life.

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It's not that we don't have enough scoundrels to curse; it's that we don't have enough good men to curse them.

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A great deal of contemporary criticism reads to me like a man saying, 'Of course I do not like green cheese. I am very fond of brown sherry.

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Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home; because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be a usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution.

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I am not fighting a hopeless fight. People who have fought in real fights don't, as a rule.

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Most Americans are born drunk, and really require a little wine or beer to sober them. They have a sort of permanent intoxication from within, a sort of invisible champagne. Americans do not need to drink to inspire them to do anything, though they do sometimes, I think, need a little for the deeper and more delicate purpose of teaching them how to do nothing.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Teaching Quotes , Wine Quotes