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I have formed a very clear conception of patriotism. I have generally found it thrust into the foreground by some fellow who has something to hide in the background. I have seen a great deal of patriotism and I have generally found it the last refuge of the scoundrel.

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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Beaconsfield
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Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
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More quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

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Life is serious all the time, but living cannot be. You may have all the solemnity you wish in your neckties, but in anything important (such as sex, death, and religion), you must have mirth or you will have madness.
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The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
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Tolerance is a virtue of people who don't believe in anything anymore.
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Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.
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The wine they drink in Paradise They make in Haute Lorraine.
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The eagle has no liberty he only has loneliness.
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To mix science up with philosophy is only to produce a philosophy that has lost all its ideal value and a science that has lost all its practical value. It is for my private physician to tell me whether this or that food will kill me. It is for my private philosopher to tell me whether I ought to be killed.
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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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It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.
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The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea.
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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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No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be.
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The humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together.
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Original sin is the only doctrine that's been empirically validated by 2,000 years of human history.
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The aim of life is appreciation there is no sense in not appreciating things and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.
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Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are - of immeasurable stature.
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To be simple is the best thing in the world.
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The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.
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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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Half a truth is better than no politics.
Gilbert K. Chesterton