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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.

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

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Dipsomaniac and the abstainer are not only both mistaken, but they both make the same mistake. They both regard wine as a drug and not as a drink.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
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Evil comes at leisure like the disease. Good comes in a hurry like the doctor.
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If our caricaturists do not hate their enemies, it is not because they are too big to hate them, but because their enemies are not big enough to hate.
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The mind moves by instincts, associations and premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Because our expression is imperfect we need friendship to fill up the imperfections.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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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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When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press... It is not we who silence the press. It is the press who silences us.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Architecture approaches nearer than any other art to being irrevocable because it is so difficult to get rid of.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a luminous nose...to the child it is sufficiently strange and humorous to have a nose at all.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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It is always the secure who are humble.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or in German.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Only poor men get hanged.
Gilbert K. Chesterton