G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Quotes

• The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.

• An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.

• There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.

• "My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."

• The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

• You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution

• The thing I hate about an argument is that it always interrupts a discussion.

• There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

• The poor complain that they are governed badly. The rich complain that they are governed at all.

• You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

• Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.

• To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

• If there were no God, there would be no Atheists.

• The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.

• The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.

• 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.

• I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.

• 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.

• There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

• I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.