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Soldiers have many faults, but they have one redeeming merit they are never worshippers of force. Soldiers more than any other men are taught severely and systematically that might is not right. The fact is obvious. The might is in the hundred men who obey. The right (or what is held to be right) is in the one man who commands them.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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Gilbert K. Chesterton
Age: 62 †
Born: 1874
Born: May 29
Died: 1936
Died: June 14
Autobiographer
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Beaconsfield
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Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
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We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.
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And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts its happy tales are of broken heads.
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Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.
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All men are ordinary men the extraordinary men are those who know it.
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For Tommy, on that hot and empty afternoon, was in a state of mind in which grown-up people go away and write books about their whole world, and stories about what it is like to be married, and plays about the important problems of modern times. Tommy, being only ten years old, was not able to do harm on this large and handsome scale.
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The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad, For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.
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The objection to fairy stories is that they tell children there are dragons. But children have always known there are dragons. Fairy stories tell children that dragons can be killed.
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Half a truth is better than no politics.
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Gratitude, being nearly the greatest of human duties, is also nearly the most difficult.
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It is better to speak wisdom foolishly like the saints than to speak folly wisely like the deans.
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The modern world is a crowd of very rapid racing cars all brought to a standstill and stuck in a block of traffic.
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America is the only nation in the world that is founded on creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.
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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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Acceptance is the truest kinship with humanity.
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It is generally the man who is not ready to argue, who is ready to sneer.
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Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.
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Even in an empire of atheists the dead man is always sacred.
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The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.
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I am a journalist and have no earthly motives except curiosity and personal vanity.
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