Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.

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What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.

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We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.

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If the apple hit Newton’s nose, Newton’s nose hit the apple.

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Liberty has produced scepticism, and scepticism has destroyed liberty. The lovers of liberty thought they were leaving it unlimited, when they were only leaving it undefined. They thought they were only leaving it undefined, when they were really leaving it undefended.

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Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.

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Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.

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I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.

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Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.

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All good men are international. Nearly all bad men are cosmopolitan. If we are to be international we must be national.

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There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason.

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Do not enjoy yourself. Enjoy dances and theaters and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if you can enjoy nothing better; enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to the other alternative; but never learn to enjoy yourself.

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Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

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The cross cannot be defeated for it is defeat.

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In dealing with the arrogant asserter of doubt, it is not the right method to tell him to stop doubting. It is rather the right method to tell him to go on doubting, to doubt a little more, to doubt every day newer and wilder things in the universe, until at last, by some strange enlightenment, he may begin to doubt himself.

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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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With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.

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Now it has appeared to me unfair that humanity should be engaged perpetually in calling all those things bad which have been good enough to make other things better, in everlastingly kicking down the ladder by which it has climbed. It has appeared to me that progress should be something else besides a continual parricide; therefore I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea.

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English experience indicates that when the two great political parties agree about something it is generally wrong.

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Because a girl should have long hair, she should have clean hair; because she should have clean hair, she should not have an unclean home; because she should not have an unclean home, she should have a free and leisured mother; because she should have a free mother, she should not have an usurious landlord; because there should not be a usurious landlord, there should be a redistribution of property; because there should be a redistribution of property, there shall be a revolution.

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