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There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.

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
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Philosopher
Beaconsfield
Buckinghamshire
Gilbert Keith Chesterton
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Gilbert Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton
G. K. C.
Behaved
Small
Ever
Aristocracy
Every
Existed
Like
Points
Essential
Essentials
Exactly
Wise

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Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up satisfies it supremely in this, that by its creed Joy becomes something gigantic, and Sadness something special and small.
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In the end it will not matter to us whether we wrote well or ill whether we fought with flails or reeds. It will matter to us greatly on what side we fought.
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Feminists are those who cannot stand female characteristics.
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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.
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It is not only possible to say a great deal in praise of play it is really possible to say the highest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden heaven is a playground.
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I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
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We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.
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He said he didn't very well understand how George was going to sleep any more than he did now, seeing that there were only twenty-four hours in each day.
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I despise Birth-Control first because it is ... an entirely meaningless word and is used so as to curry favour even with those who would first recoil from its real meaning. The proceeding these quack doctors recommend does not control any birth.
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When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.
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It is quite an old-fashioned fallacy to suppose that our objection to scepticism is that it removes the discipline from life. Our objection to scepticism is that it removes the motive power. Materialism is not a thing which destroys mere restraint. Materialism itself is the great restraint.
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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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Every time a man knocks on a brothel door, he is really knocking for God
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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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How quickly revolutions grow old and, worse still, respectable.
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The true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden heaven is a playground.
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if a man would make his world large, he must be always making himself small.
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The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery.
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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 moderns do not realize modernity.
Gilbert K. Chesterton