GK Chesterton (1874-1936)

Quotes

• 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.