Quotes from Gilbert Keith Chesterton:

Poet, essayist, novelist, philosopher, theologian, "apostle of common sense", prolific prose writer,...

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  • I had no more idea of becoming a Catholic than of becoming a cannibal. I imagined that I was merely pointing out that justice should be done even to cannibals . . . [but] it is impossible to be just to the Catholic Church. The moment men cease to pull against it they feel a tug towards it. The moment they cease to shout it down they begin to listen to it with pleasure. The moment they try to be fair to it they begin to be fond of it . . . {The Catholic Church and Conversion, NY: Macmillan, 1926, 59,62}
  • Somewhere about the beginning of the nineteenth century, we English came to the conclusion that we could not think. This seemed, for some reason, to please us very much. And indeed it would not have mattered seriously if we had not immediately begun to think about our own thoughtlessness. We had a theory that we had no theory. Now, this kind of thing will not do; because whatever advantages there really are in being vague involve the idea that one does not know that one is vague. The one advantage of a child is that he does not know that he is a child . . . When England became proud of being unreasonable, then England lost all the force that belongs to pure folly. {"The Anomalies of English Politics," The Illustrated London News, 7 March 1908}
  • Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death . . . I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the same idea. {Orthodoxy, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1908, 48}
  • There is something odd in the fact that when we reproduce the Middle Ages it is always some such rough and half-grotesque part of them that we reproduce . . . Why is it that we mainly remember the Middle Ages by absurd things? . . . Few modern people know what a mass of illuminating philosophy, delicate metaphysics, clear and dignified social morality exists in the serious scholastic writers of mediaeval times. But we seem to have grasped somehow that the ruder and more clownish elements in the Middle Ages have a human and poetical interest. We are delighted to know about the ignorance of mediaevalism; we are contented to be ignorant about its knowledge. When we talk of something mediaeval, we mean something quaint. We remember that alchemy was mediaeval, or that heraldry was mediaeval. We forget that Parliaments are mediaeval, that all our Universities are mediaeval, that city corporations are mediaeval, that gunpowder and printing are mediaeval, that half the things by which we now live, and to which we look for progress, are mediaeval." {"The True Middle Ages," The Illustrated London News, 14 July 1906}
  • The early Church was ascetic, but she proved that she was not pessimistic, simply by condemning the pessimists. The creed declared that man was sinful, but it did not declare that life was evil . . . The condemnation of the early heretics is itself condemned as something crabbed and narrow; but it was in truth the very proof that the Church meant to be brotherly and broad. It proved that the primitive Catholics were specially eager to explain that they did not think man utterly vile; that they did not think life incurably miserable; that they did not think marriage a sin or procreation a tragedy. {The Everlasting Man, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1925, 223}
  • History does not consist of completed and crumbling ruins; rather it consists of half-built villas abandoned by a bankrupt builder. This world is more like an unfinished suburb than a deserted cemetery. {What's Wrong With the World, NY: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1910, 53}
  • Unfortunately, 19th-century scientists were just as ready to jump to the conclusion that any guess about nature was an obvious fact, as were 17th-century sectarians to jump to the conclusion that any guess about Scripture was the obvious explanation . . . . and this clumsy collision of two very impatient forms of ignorance was known as the quarrel of Science and Religion. {Saint Thomas Aquinas, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1933, 88}
  • Creeds must disagree: it is the whole fun of the thing. If I think the universe is triangular, and you think it is square, there cannot be room for two universes. We may argue politely, we may argue humanely, we may argue with great mutual benefit; but, obviously, we must argue. Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence. To say that I must not deny my opponent's faith is to say I must not discuss it . . . It is absurd to have a discussion on Comparative Religions if you don't compare them. {"The History of Religions," The Illustrated London News, 10 October 1908}
  • A thinking man can think himself deeper and deeper into Catholicism . . . conversion is the beginning of an active, fruitful, progressive and even adventurous life of the intellect . . . To exalt the Mass is to enter into a magnificent world of metaphysical ideas, illuminating all the relations of matter and mind, of flesh and spirit, of the most impersonal abstractions as well as the most personal affections. To set out to belittle and minimise the Mass, by talking ephemeral back-chat about what it had in common with Mithras or the Mysteries, is to be in altogether a more petty and pedantic mood; not only lower than Catholicism but lower even than Mithraism . . . It is precisely the dogmas that are living, that are inspiring, that are intellectually interesting. {The Thing, NY: Sheed & Ward, 1929, 212-213}
  • People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad . . . The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable . . . It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob . . . It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to avoid them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect. {Orthodoxy, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1908, 100-101}
  • I could not understand why these romancers never took the trouble to find out a few elementary facts about the thing they denounced. The facts might easily have helped the denunciation, where the fictions discredited it. There were any number of real Catholic doctrines I should then have thought disgraceful to the Church . . . But the enemies of the Church never found these real rocks of offence. They never looked for them. They never looked for anything . . . Boundless freedom reigned; it was not treated as if it were a question of fact at all . . . It puzzled me very much, even at that early stage, to imagine why people bringing controversial charges against a powerful and prominent institution should thus neglect to test their own case, and should draw in this random way on their own imagination . . . I never dreamed that the Roman religion was true; but I knew that its accusers, for some reason or other, were curiously inaccurate. (The Catholic Church and Conversion, NY: Macmillan, 1926, 36-38)
  • Very nearly everybody, in the ordinary literary and journalistic world, began by taking it for granted that my faith in the Christian creed was a pose or a paradox. The more cynical supposed that it was only a stunt. The more generous and loyal warmly maintained that it was only a joke. It was not until long afterwards that the full horror of the truth burst upon them; the disgraceful truth that I really thought the thing was true. And I have found, as I say, that this represents a real transition or border-line in the life of apologists. Critics were almost entirely complimentary to what they were pleased to call my brilliant paradoxes; until they discovered that I really meant what I said. Since then they have been more combative; and I do not blame them. {Autobiography, NY: Sheed & Ward, 1936, 180; referring to the period in which Orthodoxy was written (1908) }
  • Any extreme of Catholic asceticism is a wise, or unwise, precaution against the evil of the Fall; it is never a doubt about the good of the Creation. {Saint Thomas Aquinas, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1933, 105}
  • Nobody can understand the greatness of the 13th century, who does not realise that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the Renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing. {Saint Thomas Aquinas, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1933, 41}
  • Any man with eyes in his head, whatever the ideas in his head, who looks at the world as it is today, must know that the whole social substance of marriage has changed . . . Numbers of normal people are getting married, thinking already that they may be divorced . . . The Church was right to refuse even the exception. The world has admitted the exception; and the exception has become the rule . . . The Catholic Church, standing almost alone, declared that it would in fact lead to an anarchical position; and the Catholic Church was right. {The Well and the Shallows, NY: Sheed & Ward, 1935, 42-43}
  • Any number of people assume that the Bible says that Eve ate an apple, or that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Yet the Bible never says a word about whales or apples. In the former case it refers to a fish, which might imply any sort of sea-monster; and in the second, to the essential experience of fruition, or tasting the fruit of the tree, which is obviously more general and even more mystical . . . The things that look silly now are the first rationalistic explanations rather than the first religious or primitive outlines. If those original images had been left in their own natural mystery of dark fruition or dim monsters of the deep, nobody would have quarrelled with them half so much . . . But it is unfair to turn round and blame the Bible because of all these legends and jokes and journalistic allusions, which are read into the Bible by people who have not read the Bible. {"The Bible and the Skeptics," The Illustrated London News, 20 April 1929}
  • It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into anything. {Saint Thomas Aquinas, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1933, 174}
  • The Church is from the first a thing holding its own position and point of view, quite apart from the accidents and anarchies of its age. That is why it deals blows impartially right and left, at the pessimism of the Manichean or the optimism of the Pelagian. It was not a Manichean movement because it was not a movement at all. It was not an official fashion because it was not a fashion at all. It was something that could coincide with movements and fashions, could control them and could survive them. {The Everlasting Man, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1925, 228}
  • I suspect that we should find several occasions when Christendom was thus to all appearance hollowed out from within by doubt and indifference, so that only the old Christian shell stood as the pagan shell had stood so long. But the difference is that in every such case, the sons were fanatical for the faith where the fathers had been slack about it. This is obvious in the case of the transition from the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation. It is obvious in the case of a transition from the eighteenth century to the many Catholic revivals of our own time . . . Just as some might have thought the Church simply a part of the Roman Empire, so others later might have thought the Church only a part of the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages ended as the Empire had ended; and the Church should have departed with them, if she had been also one of the shades of night. {The Everlasting Man, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1925, 250-252}
  • At least five times, . . . with the Arian and the Albigensian, with the Humanist sceptic, after Voltaire and after Darwin, the Faith has to all appearance gone to the dogs. In each of these five cases it was the dog that died. {The Everlasting Man, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1925, 254}
  • The Renaissance was in some ways a real improvement, and never more than when it was conducted in the same religious centres as the mediaeval life. I know very well that Thomas More understood some things better than Thomas Becket. I agree that Humanism was often human. But we moderns, who are the children of the Renaissance, have worked out its destiny and are pretty near to its death. In a hundred ways, especially ethical and economic, its last effects are merely a trail and tangle of tragedies . . . The Renaissance is very old; the rebirth needs to be reborn and to become more like a little child. {"The Imagination of the Renaissance," The Illustrated London News, 13 December 1924}
  • It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed. For the duel is deadly; and any agnostic who wishes to be anything more than a Nihilist must sympathize with one version of nature or the other. {The Victorian Age in Literature, Oxford Univ. Press, 1913, 62-63}
  • The mind of modern man is a curious mixture of decayed Calvinism and diluted Buddhism; and he expresses his philosophy without knowing that he holds it. We [i.e., Catholics] say what it is natural for us to say; but we know what we are saying; therefore it is assumed that we are saying it for effect. He says what it is natural for him to say; but he does not know what he is saying, still less why he is saying it . . . He is just as partisan; . . . just as much depending on one doctrinal system as distinct from another. But he has taken it for granted so often that he has forgotten what it is. So his literature does not seem to him partisan, even when it is. But our literature does seem to him propagandist, even when it isn't. {The Thing, NY: Sheed & Ward, 1929, 120}
  • Catholics, I need not say, are about as likely to call the Pope God as to call a grasshopper the Pope. {The Thing, NY: Sheed & Ward, 1929, 243}
  • I look at the New Theology, however, and find that it is an old Theology, that it is even more than that - that it is something older and duller than Theology itself; that it is the dim and vague cosmogony which men required before they were intellectual enough to require Theology. {"Creed and Deed," The Illustrated London News, 2 February 1907}
  • It has been left to the last Christians, or rather to the first Christians fully committed to blaspheming and denying Christianity, to invent a new kind of worship of Sex, which is not even a worship of Life. It has been left to the very latest Modernists to proclaim an erotic religion which at once exalts lust and forbids fertility . . . The new priests abolish the fatherhood and keep the feast - to themselves.{The Well and the Shallows, NY: Sheed & Ward, 1935, 233}
  • Nearly all the "skulls," out of which Missing Links and Monkey Men have been made, have been only bits of bone. I do know that even of these bits of bone there are only about two or three in the whole world. But as long as those bits of bone were supposed to point, like the pebbles in the fairy-tale, along a particular path, a very gradual upward path of evolution, a scientific progress, nobody dared to suggest that such evidence was rather slight. Nobody ventured to complain that one skull was insufficient, or that one scrap of one skull was insufficient. Any minute bit of any mouldy bone was good enough for the purpose, so long as the evolutionists recognised it as a good purpose. Anything proved anything, so long as it proved the proper, progressive, really evolutionary thing. {"Outlines of History," The Illustrated London News, 13 January 1923}
  • They have invented a phrase, a phrase that is a black and white contradiction in two words - "free love" - as if a lover ever had been, or ever could be, free. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. {The Defendant, NY: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1902, 23}
  • I have much more sympathy with the person who leaves the Church for a love-affair than with one who leaves it for a long-winded German theory to prove that God is evil or that children are a sort of morbid monkey. But the very laws of life are against the endurance of a revolt that rests on nothing but natural passion; it is bound to change in its proportion with the coming of experience; and, at the worst, it will become a battle between bad Catholics and good Catholics, with the great dome over all. {The Catholic Church and Conversion, NY: Macmillan, 1926, 115}
  • The great temptation of the Catholic . . . is the temptation to intellectual pride. It is so obvious that most of his critics are talking without in the least knowing what they are talking about, that he is sometimes a little provoked towards the very un-Christian logic of answering a fool according to his folly. He is a little bit disposed to luxuriate in secret, as it were, over the much greater subtlety and richness of the philosophy he inherits; and only answer a bewildered barbarian so as to bewilder him still more. He is tempted to ironical agreements or even to disguising himself as a dunce . . . So many people are at once preoccupied with it and prejudiced against it. It is queer to observe so much ignorance with so little indifference. They love talking about it and they hate hearing about it . . . I fancy there is more than meets the eye in this curious controversial attitude; the desire to ask rhetorical questions and not to ask real questions; the wish to heckle and not to hear. {The Thing, NY: Sheed & Ward, 1929, l34, 81-82}
  • Even the nature-worship which Pagans have felt, even the nature-love which Pantheists have felt, ultimately depends as much on some implied purpose and positive good in things, as does the direct thanksgiving which Christians have felt. Indeed Nature is at best merely a female name we give to Providence when we are not treating it very seriously; a piece of feminist mythology. There is a sort of fireside fairytale, more fitted for the hearth than for the altar; and in that what is called Nature can be a sort of fairy godmother. But there can only be fairy godmothers because there are godmothers; and there can only be godmothers because there is God. {Autobiography, NY: Sheed & Ward, 1936, 348}
  • Very few people in this world would care to listen to the real defense of their own characters. The real defense, the defense which belongs to the Day of Judgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away so many artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness and failure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by the world than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy. {Robert Browning, London: Macmillan, 1914, 188}
  • Romance is more solid than realism, and that for a very evident reason. The things that men happen to get in this life depend upon quite shifting accidents and conditions. But the things that they desire and dream of are always the same. {"Romantic and Realistic Drama", The Illustrated London News, 17 March 1906}
  • A world in which men know that most of what they know is probably untrue cannot be dignified with the name of a sceptical world; it is simply an impotent and abject world, not attacking anything, but accepting everything while trusting nothing; accepting even its own incapacity to attack; accepting its own lack of authority to accept; doubting its very right to doubt. We are grateful for this public experiment and demonstration; it has taught us much. We did not believe that rationalists were so utterly mad until they made it quite clear to us. We did not ourselves think that the mere denial of our dogmas could end in such dehumanised and demented anarchy. It might have taken the world a long time to understand that what it had been taught to dismiss as mediaeval theology was often mere common sense; although the very term common sense, or communis sententia, was a mediaeval conception. But it took the world very little time to understand that the talk on the other side was most uncommon nonsense. It was nonsense that could not be made the basis of any common system, such as has been founded upon common sense.{The Well and the Shallows, NY: Sheed & Ward, 1935, 79-80}
  • Pride consists in a man making his personality the only test, instead of making truth the test. It is not pride to wish to do well, or even to look well, according to a real test. It is pride to think that a thing looks ill. because it does not look like something characteristic of oneself. {The Common Man, NY: Sheed & Ward, 1950, 254}
  • St. Francis was so great and original a man that he had something in him of what makes the founder of a religion . . . That was the point the Pope had to settle; whether Christendom should absorb Francis or Francis Christendom. And he decided rightly, . . . for the Church could include all that was good in the Franciscans and the Franciscans could not include all that was good in the Church. {St. Francis of Assisi, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1924, 150-151}
  • I have not myself any instinctive kinship with that enthusiasm for physical virginity, which has certainly been a note of historic Christianity. But when I look not at myself but at the world, I perceive that this enthusiasm is not only a note of Christianity, but a note of Paganism, a note of high human nature in many spheres. The Greeks felt virginity when they carved Artemis, the Romans when they robed the vestals, the worst and wildest of the great Elizabethan playwrights clung to the literal purity of a woman as to the central pillar of the world. Above all, the modern world (even while mocking sexual innocence) has flung itself into a generous idolatry of sexual innocence -- the great modern worship of children. For any man who loves children will agree that their peculiar beauty is hurt by a hint of physical sex. With all this human experience, allied with the Christian authority, I simply conclude that I am wrong, and the church right; or rather that I am defective, while the church is universal. It takes all sorts to make a church; she does not ask me to be celibate. But the fact that I have no appreciation of the celibates, I accept like the fact that I have no ear for music. The best human experience is against me, as it is on the subject of Bach. Celibacy is one flower in my father's garden, of which I have not been told the sweet or terrible name. But I may be told it any day. {Orthodoxy, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1908, 156}
  • Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground. Christianity is the only frame which has preserved the pleasure of Paganism. We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased. {Orthodoxy, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1908, 145}
  • If ever a faith is firmly grounded again, it will be at least interesting to notice those few things that have bridged the gulf, that stood firm when faith was lost, and were still standing when it was found again. Of these really interesting things one, in all probability, will be the English celebration of Christmas. Father Christmas was with us when the fairies departed; and please God he will still be with us when the gods return. Of course, it is covered up, like every other living thing, with a sort of moss of convention and the unmeaning use of words . . . There is nothing really wrong with the whole modern world except that it does not fit in with Christmas. The modern world will have to fit in with Christmas or die . . . All Christmas feasts, all Christmas freaks, are founded on human equality: at least, upon what is now called equality of opportunity . . . The real basis of life is not scientific; the strongest basis of life is sentimental. People are not economically obliged to live. Anybody can die for nothing. People romantically desire to live - especially at Christmas. {"The Wrong Books at Christmas," The Illustrated London News, 9 January 1909}
  • The beauty and the real blessing of the story do not lie in the mechanical plot of it, the repentance of Scrooge, probable or improbable; they lie in the great furnace of real happiness that glows through Scrooge and everything around him; that great furnace, the heart of Dickens. Whether the Christmas visions would or would not convert Scrooge, they convert us. {Charles Dickens: Last of the Great Men, NY: Press of the Readers Club, 1942 (orig. 1906), 123}
  • Comfort, especially this vision of Christmas comfort, is the reverse of a gross or material thing. It is far more poetical, properly speaking, than the Garden of Epicurus. It is far more artistic than the Palace of Art. It is more artistic because it is based upon a contrast, a contrast between the fire and wine within the house and the winter and roaring rains without. It is far more poetical, because there is in it a note of defense, almost of war; a note of being besieged by the snow and hail; of making merry in the belly of a fort. {Charles Dickens: Last of the Great Men, NY: Press of the Readers Club, 1942 (orig. 1906), 118-119}
  • You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
  • There is many a tender old Tory imagination that vaguely feels that our streets would be hung with escutcheons and tapestries, if only the profane vulgar had not hung them with advertisements of Sapolio and Sunlight Soap. But advertisement does not come from the unlettered many. It comes from the refined few. Did you ever hear of a mob rising to placard the Town Hall with proclamations in favor of Sapolio? Did you ever see a poor, ragged man laboriously drawing and painting a picture on the wall in favour of Sunlight Soap - simply as a labour of love? It is nonsense; those who hang our public walls with ugly pictures are the same select few who hang their private walls with exquisite and expensive pictures. The vulgarization of life has come from the governing class; from the highly educated class.
  • I'm still a liberal. It's those people who aren't liberals.
  • My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.
  • When such a critic says, for instance, that faith kept the world in darkness until doubt led to enlightenment, he is himself taking things on faith, things that he has never been sufficiently enlightened to doubt. That exceedingly crude simplification of human history is what he has been taught, and he believes it because he has been taught. I do not blame him for that; I merely remark that he is an unconscious example of everything that he reviles.
  • When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.
  • What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves.
  • Many clever men like you have trusted to civilisation. 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?
  • The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
  • Did Herbert Spencer ever convince you - did he ever convince anybody - did he ever for one mad moment convince himself - that it must be to the interest of the individual to feel a public spirit? ... Herbert Spencer refrained from theft for the same reason that he refrained from wearing feathers in his hair, because he was an English gentleman with different tastes.
  • It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
  • We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.
  • Men will ask what selfish sort of woman it must have been who ruthlessly exacted tribute in the form of flowers, or what an avaricious creature she can have been to demand solid gold in the form of a ring; just as they ask what cruel kind of God can have demanded sacrifice and self-denial.
  • Is one religion as good as another? Is one horse in the Derby as good as another?
  • Posting a letter and getting married [sic] are among the few things left that are entirely romantic; for to be entirely romantic, a thing must be irrevocable.
  • To be in a romance is to be in uncongenial surroundings.
  • It is of the new things that men tire - of fashions and proposals and improvements and change. It is the old things that startle and intoxicate. It is the old things that are young.
  • If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
  • ...[T]here are many kinds of sincerity and insincerity. When you say 'thank you' for the salt, do you mean what you say? No. When you say 'the world is round,' do you mean what you say? No. It is true, but you don't mean it.
  • Omar Khayyam's wine-bibbing is bad, not because it is wine-bibbing. It is bad, and very bad, because it is medical wine-bibbing. It is the drinking of a man who drinks because he is not happy. ... He feasts because life is not joyful; he revels because he is not glad.
  • To have a horror of tobacco is not to have an abstract standard of right; but exactly the opposite. It is to have no standard of right whatever; and to make certain local likes and dislikes as a substitute.
  • To each man one soul only is given; to each soul only is given a little power - the power at some moments to outgrow and swallow up the stars. If age after age that power comes upon men, whatever gives it to them is great. Whatever makes men feel old is mean - an empire or a skin-flint shop. Whatever makes men feel young is great - a great war or a love story.
  • For it is a sin against the reason to tell men that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive; and when once they believe it, they travel hopefully no longer.
  • "Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before." - Tremendous Trifles
  • "A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man." - A Utopia of Usurers, CW, V, p396
  • "The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice." - A Defense of Humilities, The Defendant, 1901
  • "A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it." - Everlasting Man, 1925
  • "Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions." - ILN, 4/19/30
  • "Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance." - The Speaker, 12/15/00
  • "An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered." - On Running After Ones Hat, All Things Considered, 1908
  • "What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism." - Sidelights on New London and Newer New York
  • "He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head." - Tremendous Trifles, 1909
  • "Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it." - A Miscellany of Men
  • "Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity." - The Man Who was Thursday, 1908
  • "The simplification of anything is always sensational." - Varied Types
  • "Complaint always comes back in an echo from the ends of the world; but silence strengthens us." - The Father Brown Omnibus
  • "Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish." - ILN 1-11-08
  • "I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid." - ILN 6-3-22
  • "The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel." - "Sir Walter Scott," Twelve Types
  • "The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are." - Introduction to The Defendant
  • "To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it." - A Short History of England, Ch.10
  • "All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing." - "On Gargoyles." Alarms and Discursions
  • "The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man." - ILN 2-10-06
  • "We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera." - The Quotable Chesterton
  • "When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any." - ILN 11-7-08
  • "The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog." - Broadcast talk 6-11-35
  • "Aesthetes never do anything but what they are told." - "The Love of Lead" Lunacy and Letters
  • "The aesthete aims at harmony rather than beauty. If his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing, he hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve. If his wife does not go with the wall-paper, he gets a divorce." - ILN,12/25/09
  • "The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right." - ILN 10-28-22
  • "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." - "Charles II" Twelve Types
  • "Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink." - "Wine when it is red" All Things Considered
  • "When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale." - Heretics, CW, I, p.143
  • "A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish." - Maycock, The Man Who Was Orthodox
  • "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." - The Common Man
  • "Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street." - ILN, 11/16/07
  • "When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them." - Chesterton Review, February, 1984
  • "I agree with the realistic Irishman who said he preferred to prophesy after the event." - ILN, 10/7/16
  • "Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative." - Chapter 2, Heretics, 1905
  • "Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision." - Orthodoxy, 1908
  • "My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday." - New York Times Magazine, 2/11/23
  • "Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back." - What's Wrong With The World, 1910
  • "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around." - Orthodoxy, 1908
  • "The modern world is a crowd of very rapid racing cars all brought to a standstill and stuck in a block of traffic." - ILN, 5/29/26
  • "Comforts that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out wholesale; and indeed, nobody nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space, quiet, decency and good manners, need be without anything whatever that he wants; or at least a reasonably cheap imitation of it." - Commonwealth, 1933
  • "A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possible be alive." - A Miscellany of Men
  • "None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them." Ð Daily News 7-21-06
  • "I still hold. . . that the suburbs ought to be either glorified by romance and religion or else destroyed by fire from heaven, or even by firebrands from the earth." - The Coloured Lands
  • "The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is, the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of the mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings." - "The New House" Alarms and Discursions
  • "To hurry through one's leisure is the most unbusiness-like of actions." - "A Somewhat Improbable Story." Tremendous Trifles
  • "This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities." - ILN, 12/20/19
  • "The past is not what it was." - A Short History of England
  • "[Marxism will] in a generation or so [go] into the limbo of most heresies, but meanwhile it will have poisoned the Russian Revolution." - ILN, 7/19/19
  • "War is not 'the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you." - ILN, 7/24/15
  • "There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting." - Everlasting Man, 1925
  • "The only defensible war is a war of defense." - Autobiography, 1937
  • "The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him." - ILN, 1/14/11
  • "How quickly revolutions grow old; and, worse still, respectable." - The Listener. 3-6-35
  • "Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." - Christendom in Dublin, 1933
  • "America is the only country ever founded on a creed." - What I Saw In America, 1922
  • "The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man." - Chapter 19, What I Saw In America, 1922
  • "The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed." - What I Saw In America, 1922
  • "When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws." - Daily News, 7/29/05
  • "Men are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern." - The New Name, Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays, 1917
  • "If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will have no answer except slanging or silence." - Chapter 3, What's Wrong With The World, 1910
  • "He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative." - Varied Types
  • "You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution. - Tremendous Trifles, 1909
  • "For fear of the newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for the newspapers." - All Things Considered, 1908
  • "When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it." - ILN, 4/6/18
  • "It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular." - A Short History of England. 156
  • "I have formed a very clear conception of patriotism. I have generally found it thrust into the foreground by some fellow who has something to hide in the background. I have seen a great deal of patriotism; and I have generally found it the last refuge of the scoundrel." - The Judgement of Dr. Johnson, Act III
  • "It is terrible to contemplete how few politicians are hanged." - The Cleveland Press, 3/1/21
  • "There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants." Ð Outline of Sanity CW. V. 192
  • "All government is an ugly necessity." Ð A Short History of England. 63
  • "It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote." - ILN, 8/17/18
  • "It is a good sign in a nation when things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on." - "Patriotism and Sport," All Things Considered
  • "The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected." - ILN, 4/19/24
  • "I never could see anything wrong in sensationalism; and I am sure our society is suffering more from secrecy than from flamboyant revelations." - ILN, 10/4/19
  • "With all that we hear of American hustle and hurry, it is rather strange that Americans seem to like to linger on longer words." - What I Saw in America
  • "It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile." - The Judgement of Dr. Johnson, Act III
  • "I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that, while they are always talking about things as problems, they have hardly any notion of what a real problem is." - Uses of Diversity
  • "There have been household gods and household saints and household fairies. I am not sure that there have yet been any factory gods or factory saints or factory fairies. I may be wrong, as I am no commericial expert, but I have not heard of them as yet." - ILN Dec 18, 1926
  • "Over-civilization and barbarism are within an inch of each other. And a mark of both is the power of medicine-men." - ILN 9-11-09
  • "By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men." - ILN, 3/25/11
  • "The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies." - "The Way to the Stars" Lunacy and Letters
  • "Self-denial is the test and definition of self-government." - "The Field of Blood" Alarms and Discursions
  • "Love means loving the unlovable - or it is no virtue at all." - Heretics, 1905
  • "A man imagines a happy marriage as a marriage of love; even if he makes fun of marriages that are without love, or feels sorry for lovers who are without marriage." - Chaucer
  • "Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men." - A Handful of Authors
  • "The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis." - "David Copperfield," Chesterton on Dickens, 1911
  • "A good man's work is effected by doing what he does, a woman's by being what she is." - Robert Browning
  • "Women have a thirst for order and beauty as for something physical; there is a strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men virtue." - Chesterton on Dickens
  • "Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline." - Manalive
  • "The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous." - ILN 1/9/09
  • "I have little doubt that when St. George had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess." - The Victorian Age in Literature
  • "One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created." - The Boston Sunday Post, 1/16/21
  • "The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people." - ILN, 7/16/10
  • "If there were no God, there would be no atheists." - Where All Roads Lead, 1922
  • "There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions." - ILN, 1/13/06
  • "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." - Chapter 5, What's Wrong With The World, 1910
  • "The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man." - Introduction to the Book of Job, 1907
  • "It has been often said, very truely, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary." - Charles Dickens
  • "Theology is only thought applied to religion." - The New Jerusalem
  • "The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden." - ILN 1-3-20
  • "These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own." - ILN 8-11-28
  • "Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake." - Blake
  • "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." - "Christmas," All Things Considered
  • "If a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse for drunkeness and gluttony, that would be false, but it would have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says that Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by Poulterers and wine merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which is not so much false as startling and arrestingly foolish. He might as well say that the two sexes were invented by jewellers who wanted to sell wedding rings." - George Bernard Shaw, Ch. 6
  • "Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate." - The New Jerusalem, Ch. 5
  • "The more we are proud that the Bethlehem story is plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep, the more do we let ourselves go, in dark and gorgeous imaginative frescoes or pageants about the mystery and majesty of the Three Magian Kings." - Christendom in Dublin, Ch.3
  • "The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why." - "On Christmas," Generally Speaking
  • "Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable." - ILN, 10/23/09
  • "It's not that we don't have enough scoundrels to curse; it's that we don't have enough good men to curse them." - ILN, 3/14/08
  • "There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth." - ILN, 7/18/08
  • "The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice." - ILN, 6/11/10
  • "Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it." - ILN, 2/24/06
  • "Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks." - Daily News, 2/21/02
  • "It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong." - The Catholic Church and Conversion
  • "There'd be a lot less scandal if people didn't idealize sin and pose as sinners." - The Father Brown Omnibus
  • "All men thirst to confess their crimes more than tired beasts thirst for water; but they naturally object to confessing them while other people, who have also committed the same crimes, sit by and laugh at them." - ILN 3/14/08
  • "Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice." - ILN 9/11/09
  • "I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it." - ILN 8/4/06
  • "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." - Heretics, CW I, p128
  • "Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified." - ILN 9-30-33
  • "The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea." - T.P.'s Weekly, Christmas Number, 1910
  • "All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive." - The Thing. CW. III 191
  • "Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities." - What's Wrong With the World
  • "If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty." - What's Wrong with the World
  • "The world will very soon be divided, unless I am mistaken, into those who still go on explaining our success, and those somewhat more intelligent who are trying to explain our failure." - Speech to Anglo-Catholic Congress 6-29-20
  • "What we call emancipation is always and of necessity simply the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another." - Daily News12-21-05
  • "There are some desires that are not desirable." - Orthodoxy
  • "In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn." - The Speaker 2-2-01
  • "Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else." - "The Church of the Servile State" Utopia of Usurers
  • "It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can." - The Coloured Lands
  • "Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business." - G.K.'s Weekly, 4/10/26
  • "[No society can survive the socialist] fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them." - The Debate with Bertrand Russell, BBC Magazine, 11/27/35
  • "A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter." - ILN, 5/25/31
  • "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists." - The Uses of Diversity, 1921
  • "Price is a crazy and incalculable thing, while Value is an intrinsic and indestructible thing." - Reflections on a Rotten Apple, The Well and the Shallows, 1935
  • "Business, especially big business, is now organized like an army. It is, as some would say, a sort of mild militarism without bloodshed; as I say, a militarism without the military virtues." - The Thing
  • "All but the hard hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it." - Utopia of Usurers, 1917
  • "From the standpoint of any sane person, the present problem of capitalist concentration is not only a question of law, but of criminal law, not to mention criminal lunacy." - "A Case In Point," The Outline of Sanity
  • "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." - What's Wrong with the World
  • "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." - A Short History of England
  • "[Capitalism is] that commercial system in which supply immediately answers to demand, and in which everybody seems to be thoroughly dissatisfied and unable to get anything he wants." - "How to Write a Detective Story." The Spice of Life
  • "Our society is so abnormal that the normal man never dreams of having the normal occupation of looking after his own property. When he chooses a trade, he chooses one of the ten thousand trades that involve looking after other people's property." - Commonwealth10-12-32
  • "The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work." - NY Sun 11-3-18
  • "Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has certain advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work." - "Hudge and Gudge," What's Wrong with the World
  • "You can't have the family farm without the family." - Tales of the Long Bow
  • "I would give a woman not more rights, but more privileges. Instead of sending her to seek such freedom as notoriously prevails in banks and factories, I would design specially a house in which she can be free." - What's Wrong World
  • "Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere." - ILN, 5/5/28
  • "The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms." - Shaw, 1909
  • "The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs." - Chapter 16, Heretics, 1905
  • "Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder." - ILN, 11/25/05
  • "The beautification of the world is not a work of nature, but a work of art, then it involves an artist." Ð ILN 9-18-09
  • "By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece." - "On Detective Novels," Generally Speaking
  • "And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads." - Charles Dickens
  • "The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say." - Daily News.4-22-05
  • "What is called matriarchy is simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remains fixed because all the fathers are fugitive and irresponsible." - The Everlasting Man, CW II, p.186
  • "Properly speaking, of course, there is no such thing as a return to nature, because there is no such thing as a departure from it. The phrase reminds one of the slightly intoxicated gentleman who gets up in his own dining room and declares firmly that he must be getting home." - Chesterton Review, August, 1993
  • "Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition." - Lunacy and Letters
  • "For my part, I would have no executions except by the mob; or, at least, by the people acting quite exceptionally. I would make capital punishment impossible except by act of attainder. Then there would be some chance of a few of our real oppressors getting hanged. - ILN, 2/13/09
  • "Our materialistic masters could, and probably will, put Birth Control into an immediate practical programme while we are all discussing the dreadful danger of somebody else putting it into a distant Utopia." - GK's Weekly, 1/17/31
  • "Modern man is staggering and losing his balance because he is being pelted with little pieces of alleged fact which are native to the newspapers; and, if they turn out not to be facts, that is still more native to newspapers." - ILN, 4/7/23
  • "America has a genius for the encouragement of fame." - The Father Brown Omnibus
  • "The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense." - ILN, 9/7/29
  • "Though the academic authorities are actually proud of conducting everything by means of Examinations, they seldom indulge in what religious people used to descibe as Self-Examination. The consequence is that the modern State has educated its citizens in a series of ephemeral fads." - NashÕs Pall Mall Magazine. April, 1935
  • "How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?" - Orthodoxy
  • "From time to time, as we all know, a sect appears in our midst announcing that the world will very soon come to an end. Generally, by some slight confusion or miscalculation, it is the sect that comes to an end." - ILN, 9/24/27
  • "The position we have now reached is this: starting from the State, we try to remedy the failures of all the families, all the nurseries, all the schools, all the workshops, all the secondary institutions that once had some authority of their own. Everything is ultimately brought into the Law Courts. We are trying to stop the leak at the other end." - ILN, 3/24/23
  • Scientific Evidence: "The ultimate effect of the great science of Fingerprints is this: that whereas a gentleman was expected to put on gloves to dance with a lady, he may now be expected to put on gloves in order to strangle her." - Avowals and Denials, 1935
    The Verdict: "Only poor men get hanged." - ILN, 7/17/09
  • "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." - What I Saw In America, 1922
  • "Psychoanalysis is a science conducted by lunatics for lunatics. They are generally concerned with proving that people are irresponsible; and they certainly succeed in proving that some people are." - ILN, 6/23/28
  • "Let all the babies be born. Then let us drown those we do not like." - Babies and Distributism, GK's Weekly, 11/12/32
  • "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." - Autobiography, 1937
  • "Some people leave money for the improvement of public buildings. I can leave dynamite for the improvement of public buildings." Ð ILN 3-17-06
  • "A modern vegetarian is also a teetotaler, yet there is no obvious connection between consuming vegetables and not consuming fermented vegetables. A drunkard, when lifted laboriously out of the gutter, might well be heard huskily to plead that he had fallen there through excessive devotion to a vegetable diet." - William blake
  • "You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion." - "How I Met the President" Tremendous Trifles