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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.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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Gilbert K. Chesterton
Age: 62 †
Born: 1874
Born: May 29
Died: 1936
Died: June 14
Autobiographer
Biographer
Crime Writer
Essayist
Historian
Illustrator
Journalist
Literary Historian
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Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton
G. K. C.
Politics
Merely
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Means
Tradition
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Ancestor
Around
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Obscure
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Dead
Arrogant
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Orthodoxy
Class
Refuse
Refuses

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Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.
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Puritanism was an honourable mood it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake.
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The Mass is not only about God becoming man, it is about Man becoming more himself.
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...It's natural to believe in the supernatural. It never feels natural to accept only natural things.
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The scientific facts, which were supposed to contradict the faith in the nineteenth century, are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth century.
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By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men.
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Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.
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The trouble with always trying to preserve the health of the body is that it is so difficult to do without destroying the health of the mind.
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The strangest whim has seized me ... After all I think I will not hang myself today.
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A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth this has been exactly reversed.
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A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.
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What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry - but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry.
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Men rush towards complexity, but they yearn towards simplicity. They try to be kings but they dream of being shepherds.
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The moderns do not realize modernity.
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There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason.
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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.
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The one stream of poetry which is continually flowing is slang.
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We cannot fling ourselves into the blank future we can only call up images from the past. This being so, the important principle follows, that how many images we have largely depends on how much past we have.
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