Chesterton, Gilbert - Quotes

7/24/2019 Chesterton, Gilbert - Quotes

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Quotations of

G. K. Chesterton

www.lampre-editorial.com


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Quotations of G. K. Chesterton

Quotes are organized in a collection of general categories.

Timeless Truths

"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 ofHumilities, 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 NewLondon 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 wasThursday, 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



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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 andDiscursions

"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." -ILN11-7-08

"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." -ILN10-28-22

"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 ThingsConsidered

"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



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Free Advice

"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

The Cult of Progress

"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." -AMiscellany of Men

"None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the

people who choose to use them." 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



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that he swings." - "The New House" Alarms and Discursions

"To hurry through one's leisure is the most unbusiness-like of actions." - "A Somewhat ImprobableStory." 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

War and Politics

"[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

Government and Politics

"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

"TheDeclaration of Independencedogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all menequal; 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 InAmerica, 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 SawIn 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 answerexcept 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



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"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." -AllThings 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." Outline of Sanity CW. V. 192

"All government is an ugly necessity." 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

Society and Culture

"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." - TheJudgement 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 commericialexpert, 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



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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 theStars" Lunacy and Letters

"Self-denial is the test and definition of self-government." - "The Field of Blood" Alarms andDiscursions

Love, Marriage and The Sexes

"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." -RobertBrowning

"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." - TheVictorian Age in Literature

Religion and Faith

"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



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"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

Christmas

"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 twosexes 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 keepChristmas 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

Morality and Truth

"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



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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 BrownOmnibus

"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 makingmen 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." - ILN8/4/06

"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 notmake 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 toAnglo-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



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"Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else." - "The Church of the ServileState" 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

Economic Theory and Distributism

"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 ofDiversity, 1921

"Price is a crazy and incalculable thing, while Value is an intrinsic and indestructible thing." -Reflections ona 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 ofSanity

"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 aDetective 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



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"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 and Literature

"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 theartists 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." ILN9-18-09

"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 DetectiveNovels," 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

Past Words on Today's Dilemmas

Absentee Fathers

"What is called matriarchy is simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remains fixed because all thefathers are fugitive and irresponsible." - The Everlasting Man, CW II, p.186

Back To Nature"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"Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition." -Lunacy and Letters

Capital Punishment"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



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Condom Distribution"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

Credibility of the Media"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 tonewspapers." -ILN, 4/7/23

The Cult of Fame"America has a genius for the encouragement of fame." - The Father Brown Omnibus

The Education System

"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 ofExaminations, 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." -

Nashs Pall Mall Magazine. April, 1935

Heaven's Gate (Cults)

"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

A Litigious Society"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

The O.J. Trial

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 ongloves in order to strangle her." -Avowals and Denials, 1935

The Verdict: "Only poor men get hanged." -ILN, 7/17/09

Police Authority"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 ISaw In America, 1922

Psychoanlysis

"Psychoanalysis is a science conducted by lunatics for lunatics. They are generally concerned with provingthat people are irresponsible; and they certainly succeed in proving that some people are." -ILN, 6/23/28

Reproductive Rights



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"Let all the babies be born. Then let us drown those we do not like." -Babies and Distributism, GK's

Weekly, 11/12/32

Separation of Church and State"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

Urban Renewal"Some people leave money for the improvement of public buildings. I can leave dynamite for the

improvement of public buildings." ILN 3-17-06

Vegetarianism

"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

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"You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion." - "How I Met the President" Tremendous Trifles



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Chesterton, Gilbert - Quotes

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