Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

For good or evil, a line has been passed in our political history; and something that we have known all our lives is dead. I will take only one example of it: our politicians can no longer be caricatured.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Humor Quotes , Evil Quotes

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

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Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich.

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If we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Nature Quotes

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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What we call emancipation is always and of necessity simply the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Choices Quotes , Soul Quotes

The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.

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Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

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Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?

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

I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small... We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel...

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Children Quotes , Moving Quotes

I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.

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We need to be reminded more than we need to be instructed

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A faith is that which is able to survive a mood.

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Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground.

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Art is born when the temporary touches the eternal.

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Nothing is certain by uncertainty.

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But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing toward a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it particularly nasty.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Nice Quotes , People Quotes

Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit; they are never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is obvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Military Quotes , Army Quotes

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

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Tags : Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes , Political Quotes , Politics Quotes