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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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A man cannot be wise enough to be a great artist without being wise enough to wish to be a philosopher.
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Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable.
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Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. Never forget that the devil fell by force of gravity. He who has the faith has the fun.
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...a figure of speech can often get into a crack too small for a definition.
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Puritanism was an honourable mood it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake.
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It is the decisive people who have become civilised it is the indecisive, otherwise called the higher sceptics, or the idealistic doubters, who have remained barbarians.
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At any innocent tea-table we may easily hear a man say, Life is not worth living. We regard it as we regard the statement that it is a fine day nobody thinks that it can possibly have any serious effect on the man or on the world. And yet if that utterance were really believed, the world would stand on its head.
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If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.
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The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.
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Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
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It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.
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Students of popular science... are always insisting that Christianity and Buddhism are very much alike, especially Buddhism. This is generally believed, and I believed it myself until I read a book giving the reasons for it.
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He walked by instinct along one white road, on which early birds hopped and sang, and found himself outside a fenced garden. There he saw the sister of Gregory, the girl with the gold-red hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, with the great unconscious gravity of a girl.
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None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them.
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When people begin to ignore human dignity, it will not be long before they begin to ignore human rights.
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The test of happiness is gratitude.
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Feminists are those who cannot stand female characteristics.
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It is not funny that anything else should fall down only that a man should fall down... Why do we laugh? Because it is a grave religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
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Aristocracy: government by the badly educated.
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