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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
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Crime Writer
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Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton
G. K. C.
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More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
The past is democratic, because it is a people. The future is despotic, because it is a caprice. Every man is alone in his prediction, just as each man is alone in a dream.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Art is the signature of man.
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Only poor men get hanged.
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What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles it was a miraculous world.
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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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Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.
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Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.
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The reason that angels fly is that they take themselves so lightly.
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In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn.
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The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of something he cannot understand.
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If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.
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Puritanism was an honourable mood it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.
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Why be something to everybody when you can be everything to somebody?
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It is well sometimes to half understand a poem in the same manner that we half understand the world.
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Were Patrick Henry to return to earth and look around on the vast economic order of the day, he might revise his observation and merely say ‘Give me death’-the alternative being manifestly impossible under modern conditions.
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Islam was something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his soul.
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Some of the most frantic lies on the face of life are told with modesty and restraint for the simple reason that only modesty and restraint will save them.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
