GK Chesterton

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

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

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

Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.

The simplification of anything is always sensational.

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

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.

The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.

The only defensible war is a war of defense.

Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God.

America is the only country ever founded on a creed.

The <i>Declaration of Independence</i> 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.

When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.

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.

Love means loving the unlovable - or it is no virtue at all.

Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.

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.

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.

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.

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

There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.

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.

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

It has been often said, very truly, 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.

Theology is only thought applied to religion.

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.

These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.

Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.

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.

Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it.

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.

Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.

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.

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.

Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.

When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing -- they believe in anything.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Children are innocent and love justice, while most adults are wicked and prefer mercy.

If my children wake up on Christmas morning and have someone to thank for putting candy in their stocking, have I no one to thank for putting two feet in mine?

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

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

Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

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.

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.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

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.

In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

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.

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

The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.

A yawn is a silent shout.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.

Why be something to everybody when you can be everything to somebody?

Is one religion as good as another? Is one horse in the Derby as good as another?

The only right way of telling a story is to begin at the beginning--at the beginning of the world. Therefore all books have to be begun in the wrong way for the sake of brevity.

There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.