Gilbert Keith Chesterton, (1874-1936) British essayist, critic, poet, and novelist Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Comment on this quote Share via Email Print this Page [1-30] of 33 Gilbert Keith Chesterton quotesGilbert Keith Chesterton QuotesGilbert Keith Chesterton Next 30 quotes Any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and a vested interest.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton It was the mystical dogma of Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton Journalism only tells us what men are doing; it is fiction that tells us what they are thinking, and still more what they are feeling. If a new scientific theory finds the soul of a man in his dreams, at least it ought not to leave out his day-dreams. And all fiction is only a diary of day-dreams instead of days. And this profound preoccupation of men's minds with certain things always eventually has an effect even on the external expression of the age.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton 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.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton The theory of free speech, that truth is so much larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that it is very much better at all costs to hear everyone’s account of it, is a theory which has been justified on the whole by experiment, but which remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It is really one of the great discoveries of the modern time.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton 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.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton For good or evil, a line has been passed in our political history; and something that we have known all our lives is dead. I will take only one example of it: our politicians can no longer be caricatured.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton This is the perpetual and pitiful tragedy of the practical man in practical affairs. He always begins with a flourish of contempt for what he calls theorizing and what people who can do it call thinking. He will not wait for logic--that is, in the most exact sense, he will not listen to reason. It will therefore appear to him an idle and ineffectual proceeding to say that there is a reason for his present failure. Nevertheless, it may be well to say it, and to try and make it clear even to him.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton But there is another strong objection which I, one of the laziest of all the children of Adam, have against the Leisure State. Those who think it could be done argue that a vast machinery using electricity, water-power, petrol, and so on, might reduce the work imposed on each of us to a minimum. It might, but it would also reduce our control to a minimum. We should ourselves become parts of a machine, even if the machine only used those parts once a week. The machine would be our master, for the machine would produce our food, and most of us could have no notion of how it was really being produced.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton But those dealing in the actual manufacture of mind are dealing in a very explosive material. The material is not merely the clay of which man is master, but the truths or semblances of truth which have a certain mastery over man. The material is explosive because it must be taken seriously. The men writing books really are throwing bombs.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton The next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality; and especially on sexual morality. And it is coming, not from a few Socialists surviving from the Fabian Society, but from the living exultant energy of the rich resolved to enjoy themselves at last, with neither Popery nor Puritanism nor Socialism to hold them back. … The roots of the new heresy, God knows, are as deep as nature itself, whose power is the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye and the pride of life. I say that the man who cannot see this cannot see the signs of the times; cannot see even the skysigns in the street that are the new sort of signs in heaven. The madness of tomorrow is not in Moscow but much more in Manhattan.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton The Party System was founded on one national notion of fair play. It was the notion that folly and futility should be fairly divided between both sides.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton What is education? Properly speaking, there is no such thing as education. Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another. Whatever the soul is like, it will have to be passed on somehow, consciously or unconsciously, and that transition may be called education. ... What we need is to have a culture before we hand it down. In other words, it is a truth, however sad and strange, that we cannot give what we have not got, and cannot teach to other people what we do not know ourselves.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton In the end it will not matter to us whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton The life of a thinking man will probably be divided into two parts -- the first in which he desires to exterminate modern thinkers, and the second in which he desires to watch them exterminating each other. ... Suppose, for instance, there is an old story and a new skeptic who is skeptical of the story. We have only to wait a little while for a yet newer skeptic who is skeptical of the skeptic. He will probably find the old notion actually a help in his new notion. This process is an abstract truth applying to anything, apart from agreement or disagreement.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton We all have a little weakness, which is very natural but rather misleading, for supposing that this epoch must be the end of the world because it will be the end of us. How future generations will get on without us is indeed, when we come to think of it, quite a puzzle. But I suppose they will get on somehow, and may possibly venture to revise our judgments as we have revised earlier judgments.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton Forms of expression always appear turgid to those who do not share the emotions they represent.~ Gilbert Keith Chesterton Next 30 quotes Share on Facebook Tweet Email Print