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The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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Gilbert K. Chesterton
Age: 62 †
Born: 1874
Born: May 29
Died: 1936
Died: June 14
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Gilbert Keith Chesterton
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Though the academic authorities are actually proud of conducting everything by means of Examinations, they seldom indulge in what religious people used to descibe as Self-Examination. The consequence is that the modern State has educated its citizens in a series of ephemeral fads.
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To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
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People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.
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Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous sex (female) superiority that even the male child is born closer to his mother than to his father.
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But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory and in short that in most important matters a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose.
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The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.
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There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason.
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Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything.
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No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be.
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Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?
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Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out.
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Every high civilization decays by forgetting obvious things.
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Americans are a very backward people, with all the real virtues of a backward people the patriarchal simplicity and human dignity of a democracy, and a respect for labor uncorrupted by cynicism.
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A good Moslem king was one who was strict in religion, valiant in battle, just in giving judgment among his people, but not one who had the slightest objection in international matters to removing his neighbour's landmark.
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Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
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The Catholic Church is like a thick steak, a glass of red wine, and a good cigar.
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Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.
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A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes.
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I will not call it my philosophy for I did not make it. God and humanity made it and it made me.
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Passion makes every detail important.
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