Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.

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Think of all those ages through which men have had the courage to die, and then remember that we have actually fallen to talking about having the courage to live.

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America is the only country ever founded on a creed.

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The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

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Science only means knowledge; and for [Greek] ancients it did only mean knowledge. Thus the favorite science of the Greeks was Astronomy, because it was as abstract as Algebra. ... We may say that the great Greek ideal was to have no use for useful things. The Slave was he who learned useful things; the Freeman was he who learned useless things. This still remains the ideal of many noble men of science, in the sense they do desire truth as the great Greeks desired it; and their attitude is an external protest against vulgarity of utilitarianism.

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In our time the blasphemies are threadbare. Pessimism is now patently, as it always was essentially, more commonplace than piety. Profanity is now more than an affectation - it is a convention. The curse against God is Exercise I in the primer of minor poetry.

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The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

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If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing keep behind him.

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The center of every man's existence is a dream.

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Only friendliness produces friendship. And we must look far deeper into the soul of man for the thing that produces friendliness.

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Life exists for the love of music or beautiful things.

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There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.

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A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both.

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O God of earth and altar, Bow down and hear our cry, Our earthly rulers falter, Our people drift and die; The walls of gold entomb us, The swords of scorn divide, Take not thy thunder from us, But take away our pride.

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There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.

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People in high life are hardened to the wants and distresses of mankind as surgeons are to their bodily pains.

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Aristocracy: government by the badly educated.

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

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Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.

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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.

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