Quotes from Gilbert Keith Chesterton

To be born into this earth is to be born into uncongenial surroundings, hence to be born into a romance.

The poor object to being governed badly, while the rich object to being governed at all.

For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.

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

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.

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

A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man.

Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.

Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.

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

Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.

The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid. There is no big man who has not felt small. Some men never feel small; but these are the few men who are.

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 the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.

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

There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.

Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

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

A stiff apology is a second insult. The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.

Beans beans the magical fruit the more you eat the more you toot the more you eat the better you feel so let's eat beans for every meal.

Coincidences are spiritual puns.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.

Dogmatism does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.

Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.

Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery He has not been broken in two by time he is not two men, but one, and he has saved not only his soul, but his life.