Top 1337 Quotes & Sayings by Gilbert K. Chesterton - Page 23

When "everyone knows" that something is so, it is always more interesting and often illuminating to assumeexactly the opposite, and to see where that leads.

What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry - but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry.

I despise Birth-Control first because it is ... an entirely meaningless word; and is used so as to curry favour even with those who would first recoil from its real meaning. The proceeding these quack doctors recommend does not control any birth.

Every heresy has been an effort to narrow the Church.

The human race is always trying this dodge of making everything entirely easy; but the difficulty which it shifts off one thing it shifts to another.

All literary style, especially national style, is made up of such coincidences, which are a spiritual sort of puns. That is why style is untranslatable.

An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old.

Any man who preaches real love is bound to beget hate. It is as true of democratic fraternity as a divine love; sham love ends in compromise and common philosophy; but real love has always ended in bloodshed.

Aristocracy: government by the badly educated.

Such professions as the soldier and the lawyer ... give ample opportunity for crimes but not much for mere illusions. ... If you have lost a battle you cannot believe you have won it; if your client is hanged you cannot pretend that you have gotten him off.

All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

The truth is that there are no things for which men will make such herculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy.

A nation is not going mad when it does extravagant things, so long as it does them in an extravagant spirit. But whenever we see things done wildly, but taken tamely, then the State is growing insane.

And pray where in earth or heaven are there prudent marriages-Might as well talk about prudent suicides.

Plato was only a Bernard Shaw who unfortunately made his jokes in Greek.

It is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment.

I still believe in liberalism today as much as I ever did, but, oh, there was a happy time when I believed in liberals.