Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?

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The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.

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The golden age only comes to men when they have forgotten gold.

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Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas . . . for it is the assertion of a universal negative.

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Is there anyone... who will maintain that the Party System could have been created by people particularly fond of truth?

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The outer ring of Christianity is a rigid guard of ethical abnegations and professional priests; but inside that inhuman guard you will find the old human life dancing like children and drinking wine like men; for Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom. But in the modern philosophy the case is opposite; it is its outer ring that is obviously artistic and emancipated; its despair is within.

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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.

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Whenever you remove any fence, always pause long enough to ask why it was put there in the first place.

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If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals.

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The simplification of anything is always sensational.

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I have myself a poetical enthusiasm for pigs, and the paradise of my fancy is one where pigs have wings. But it is only men, especially wise men, who discuss whether pigs can fly; we have no particular proof that pigs ever discuss it.

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And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine, "I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine."

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Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists.

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The average woman is at the head of something with which she can do as she likes; the average man has to obey orders and do nothing else.

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We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.

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The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

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IF we desire European civilization to be a raid and a rescue, we shall insist rather that souls are in real peril than that their peril is ultimately unreal. And if we wish to exalt the outcast and the crucified, we shall rather wish to think that a veritable God was crucified, rather than a mere sage or hero. Above all, if we wish to protect the poor we shall be in favour of fixed rules and clear dogmas. The rules of a club are occasionally in favour of the poor member. The drift of a club is always in favour of the rich one.

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children are simply human beings who are allowed to do what everyone else really desires to do, as for instance, to fly kites, or when seriously wronged to emit prolonged screams for several minutes.

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It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.

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To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

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