Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.

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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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Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.

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The Party System was founded on one national notion of fair play. It was the notion that folly and futility should be fairly divided between both sides.

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Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.

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Being a success at work is not worth it if it means being a failure at home.

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The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness of a sick room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy, because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.

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A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.

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Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

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There is less difference than many suppose between the ideal Socialist system, in which the big businesses are run by the State, and the present Capitalist system, in which the State is run by the big businesses.

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The most important fact about the subject of education is that there is no such thing. Education is not a subject and it does not deal in subjects. It is instead the transfer of a way of life.

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To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea.

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We are Christians and Catholics not because we worship a key, but because we have passed a door; and felt the wind that is the trumpet of liberty blow over the land of the living.

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Self-denial is the test and definition of self-government.

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I don't deny," he said, "that there should be priests to remind men that they will one day die. I only say that at certain strange epochs it is necessary to have another kind of priests, called poets, actually to remind men that they are not dead yet.

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A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

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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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Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense, every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else.

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Every man is important if he loses his life;and every man is funny if he loses his hat and has to run after it.

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Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not make ivory black.

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