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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.

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.
Around
Merely
Manifestly
Earth
Return
Revise
Give
Conditions
Patrick
Look
Modern
Henry
Might
Economic
Alternative
Looks
Impossible
Alternatives
Giving
Death
Observation
Order
Vast

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A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.
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That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.
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Physical science is like simple addition: it is either infallible or it is false.
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Youth is always too serious, and just now it is too serious about frivolity.
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A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.
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The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.
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There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.
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It is true that I am of an older fashion much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.
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Our digestions, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry.
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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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Life is serious all the time, but living cannot be. You may have all the solemnity you wish in your neckties, but in anything important (such as sex, death, and religion), you must have mirth or you will have madness.
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The true object of human life is play.
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The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies.
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All men are ordinary men the extraordinary men are those who know it.
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Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which your are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. ... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal and that you are a paralytic.
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It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed.
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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.
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Instead of the machine being a giant to which the man is the pygmy, we must at last reverse the proportions until man is a giant to whom the machine is the toy.
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He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.
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When a person has found something which he prefers to life itself, he for the first time has begun to live.
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