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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That all war is physically frightful is obvious; but if that were a moral verdict, there would be no difference between a torturer and a surgeon. There are certain intellectuals who are too bright to be content with merely praising peace but who are infuriated by anybody praising war. If no war is possible, all criminality has its chance

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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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The wine they drink in Paradise They make in Haute Lorraine.

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What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business.

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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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But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit - and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist - and a Catholic.

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Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.

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

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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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Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution.

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Feminists are those who cannot stand female characteristics.

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The only object of liberty is life.

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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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I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

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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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When people begin to ignore human dignity, it will not be long before they begin to ignore human rights.

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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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Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.

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Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

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