Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

History is not a toboggan slide, but a road to be reconsidered and even retraced

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Religious unity can look like a carnival and religious liberty can look like a funeral.

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I defy anybody to say what are the rights of a citizen, if they do not include the control of his own diet in relation to his own health.

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Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.

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To be simple is the best thing in the world; to be modest is the next best thing. I am not sure about being quiet.

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I should favour anything that would increase the present enormous authority of women and their creative action in their own homes. The average woman...is a despot; the average man is a serf.

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We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth.

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It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them.

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A cosmic philosophy is not constructed to fit a man; a cosmic philosophy is constructed to fit a cosmos. A man can no more possess a private religion than he can possess a private sun and moon.

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In every serious doctrine of the destiny of men, there is some trace of the doctrine of the equality of men. But the capitalist really depends on some religion of inequality. The capitalist must somehow distinguish himself from human kind; he must be obviously above it or he would be obviously below it.

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God is like the sun; you cannot look at it, but without it you cannot look at anything else.

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Human anger is a higher thing than what is called divine discontent. For you must be angry with something; but you can be discontented with everything.

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Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.

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We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

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Against a dark sky, all flowers look like fireworks.

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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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There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trade Unions.

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If the world grows to worldly, it can be rebuked by the Church; but if the Church grows to worldly, it cannot be adequately rebuked for worldlyness by the world.

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It is very foolish of a man to be frightened of a skeleton, for Nature has put an insurmountable obstacle against running away from it.

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The only defensible war is a war of defense.

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