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A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything.
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
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Philosopher
Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton
G. K. C.
Wanted
Roots
Conserve
Everything
Meant
Affecting
Without
Except
Root
Men
Flower
Pull
Literature
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Generally
Anything
Somehow
Reason
Conservative
Conserving
More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
People decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn things.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Marriage is an adventure, like going to war.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Odd, isn't it, that a thief and a vagabond should repent, when so many who are rich and secure remain hard and frivolous, and without fruit for God or man?
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Wait and see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The people has no definite disbelief in the temples of theology. The people has a very fiery and practical disbelief in the temples of physical science.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There are some desires that are not desirable.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
History is not a toboggan slide, but a road to be reconsidered and even retraced
Gilbert K. Chesterton
All things are from God and above all, reason and imagination and the great gifts of the mind. They are good in themselves and we must not altogether forget their origin even in their perversion.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The diseased pride [of artistic individualists] was not even conscious of a public interest, and would have found all political terms utterly tasteless and insignificant. It was no longer a question of one man one vote, but of one man one universe.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front--
Gilbert K. Chesterton
The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Aristocracy: government by the badly educated.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
