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We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.

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.
People
Restrain
Laws
Law
Need
Needs
Good

More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

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the object of a new year is not that we should have a new year, but rather that we should have a new soul.
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Religious unity can look like a carnival and religious liberty can look like a funeral.
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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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The wine they drink in Paradise They make in Haute Lorraine.
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The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.
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By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.
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History is not a toboggan slide, but a road to be reconsidered and even retraced
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No man knows he is young while he is young.
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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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Man does not live by soap alone and hygiene, or even health, is not much good unless you can take a healthy view of it or, better still, feel a healthy indifference to it.
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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.
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Idolatry is when you worship what you should use, and use what you should worship.
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She had never really listened to anyone in her life which, some said, was why she had survived.
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I will go forth as a real outlaw, he said, and as men do robbery on the highway I will do right on the highway and it will be counted a wilder crime.
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An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
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Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.
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The modern world seems to have no notion of preserving different things side by side, of allowing its proper and proportionate place to each, of saving the whole varied heritage of culture. It has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.
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The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels a profound sense of gratitude and has no one to thank.
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[No society can survive the socialist] fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them.
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I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him - rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.
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