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Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.

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
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Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton
G. K. C.
Men
Devil
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Afraid
Alcohol
Economic
Gods
Law
False
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Setting
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Idolatry
War
Morality
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If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.
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People decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.
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Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.
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The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of something he cannot understand.
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Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very much.
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Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.
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There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature.
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It is always the secure who are humble.
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One can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place.
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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 decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms.
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Were Patrick Henry to return to earth and look around on the vast economic order of the day, he might revise his observation and merely say ‘Give me death’-the alternative being manifestly impossible under modern conditions.
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If a man only likes victory he must always come late for the battle.
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Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.
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We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end.
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Sticking to one woman is a small price to pay for so much as having seen one woman.
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Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers.
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A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
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I believe your own accent is inimitable, though I shall practice it in my bath.
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You may think a crime horrible because you could never commit it. I think it is horrible because I could commit it.
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