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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.
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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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
A fairly clear line separated advertisement from art. ... The first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if we allow him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will entirely disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be advertisement.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The mind moves by instincts, associations and premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
A modern vegetarian is also a teetotaler, yet there is no obvious connection between consuming vegetables and not consuming fermented vegetables. A drunkard, when lifted laboriously out of the gutter, might well be heard huskily to plead that he had fallen there through excessive devotion to a vegetable diet.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
You'll never find the solution if you don't see the problem.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There have been household gods and household saints and household fairies. I am not sure that there have yet been any factory gods or factory saints or factory fairies. I may be wrong, as I am no commericial expert, but I have not heard of them as yet.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There are many ways to fall down, but there's only one way to stand up straight.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all... As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is mere flattery or platitude it is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The reason that angels fly is that they take themselves so lightly.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Nothing is certain by uncertainty.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There are two kinds of paradoxes. They are not so much the good and the bad, nor even the true and the false. Rather they are the fruitful and the barren the paradoxes which produce life and the paradoxes that merely announce death. Nearly all modern paradoxes merely announce death.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
It is very good for a man to talk about what he does not understand as long as he understands that he does not understand it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The great saint may be said to mix all his thoughts with thanks. All goods look better when they look like gifts.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Just the other day in the Underground I enjoyed the pleasure of offering my seat to three ladies.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
