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You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

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
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton
G. K. C.
Revolution
Democracy
Freedom
Order
Must
Never
Establish
Revolutionary
Historical

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Precisely because our political speeches are meant to be reported, they are not worth reporting. Precisely because they are carefully designed to be read, nobody reads them.
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[Fairy tales] make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.
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Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.
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The simplification of anything is always sensational.
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There are a great many good people, and a great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind of coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people are wicked.
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It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.
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The trouble with Christianity is, not that its failed, but that it's never been tried . . . not that it can't remake the world, but that it's difficult.
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Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.
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Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.
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I have argued with him on almost every subject in the world, and we have always been on opposite sides, without affectation or animosity... It is necessary to disagree with him as much as I do, in order to admire him as I do and I am proud of him as a foe even more than as a friend.
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The Sentimentalist, roughly speaking, is the man who wants to eat his cake and have it. He has no sense of honor about ideas he will not see that one must pay for an idea as well as for anything else. He will have them all at once in one wild intellectual harem, no matter how much they quarrel and contradict each other.
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A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it.
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The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.
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Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence.
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In a world flagrant with the failures of civilization, what is there particularly immortal about our own?
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He walked by instinct along one white road, on which early birds hopped and sang, and found himself outside a fenced garden. There he saw the sister of Gregory, the girl with the gold-red hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, with the great unconscious gravity of a girl.
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All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.
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It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.
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I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.
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