Timeless Truths
• "Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before." - Tremendous Trifles
• "A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man." - A Utopia of Usurers, CW, V, p396
• "The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice." - A Defense of Humilities, The Defendant, 1901
• "A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it." - Everlasting Man, 1925
• "Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions." - ILN, 4/19/30
• "Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance." - The Speaker, 12/15/00
• "An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered." - On Running After Ones Hat, All Things Considered, 1908
• "What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism." - Sidelights on New London and Newer New York
• "He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head." - Tremendous Trifles, 1909
• "Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it." - A Miscellany of Men
• "Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity." - The Man Who was Thursday, 1908
• "The simplification of anything is always sensational." - Varied Types
• "Complaint always comes back in an echo from the ends of the world; but silence strengthens us." - The Father Brown Omnibus
• "Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish." - ILN 1-11-08
• "I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid." - ILN 6-3-22
• "The center of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel." - "Sir Walter Scott," Twelve Types
• "The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are." - Introduction to The Defendant
• "To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it." - A Short History of England, Ch.10
• "All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing." - "On Gargoyles." Alarms and Discursions
• "The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man." - ILN 2-10-06
• "We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera." - The Quotable Chesterton
• "When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any." - ILN 11-7-08
• "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." - Broadcast talk 6-11-35
• "Aesthetes never do anything but what they are told." - "The Love of Lead" Lunacy and Letters
• "The aesthete aims at harmony rather than beauty. If his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing, he hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve. If his wife does not go with the wall-paper, he gets a divorce." - ILN,12/25/09
• "The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right." - ILN 10-28-22
• "Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it." - "Charles II" Twelve Types
• "Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink." - "Wine when it is red" All Things Considered
• "When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale." - Heretics, CW, I, p.143
• "A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish." - Maycock, The Man Who Was Orthodox
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Free Advice
• "Do not enjoy yourself. Enjoy dances and theaters and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if you can enjoy nothing better; enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to the other alternative; but never learn to enjoy yourself." - The Common Man
• "Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street." - ILN, 11/16/07
• "When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them." - Chesterton Review, February, 1984
• "I agree with the realistic Irishman who said he preferred to prophesy after the event." - ILN, 10/7/16
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Past Words on Today's Dilemmas
1. Absentee Fathers
"What is called matriarchy is simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remains fixed because all the fathers are fugitive and irresponsible." - The Everlasting Man, CW II, p.186
2. Back To Nature
"Properly speaking, of course, there is no such thing as a return to nature, because there is no such thing as a departure from it. The phrase reminds one of the slightly intoxicated gentleman who gets up in his own dining room and declares firmly that he must be getting home." - Chesterton Review, August, 1993
3. Bigotry
"Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition." - Lunacy and Letters
4. Capital Punishment
"For my part, I would have no executions except by the mob; or, at least, by the people acting quite exceptionally. I would make capital punishment impossible except by act of attainder. Then there would be some chance of a few of our real oppressors getting hanged. - ILN, 2/13/09
5. Condom Distribution
"Our materialistic masters could, and probably will, put Birth Control into an immediate practical programme while we are all discussing the dreadful danger of somebody else putting it into a distant Utopia." - GK's Weekly, 1/17/31
6. Credibility of the Media
"Modern man is staggering and losing his balance because he is being pelted with little pieces of alleged fact which are native to the newspapers; and, if they turn out not to be facts, that is still more native to newspapers." - ILN, 4/7/23
7. The Cult of Fame
"America has a genius for the encouragement of fame." - The Father Brown Omnibus
8. The Education System
o "The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense." - ILN, 9/7/29
o "Though the academic authorities are actually proud of conducting everything by means of Examinations, they seldom indulge in what religious people used to descibe as Self-Examination. The consequence is that the modern State has educated its citizens in a series of ephemeral fads." - NashÕs Pall Mall Magazine. April, 1935
9. Heaven's Gate (Cults)
o "How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?" - Orthodoxy
o "From time to time, as we all know, a sect appears in our midst announcing that the world will very soon come to an end. Generally, by some slight confusion or miscalculation, it is the sect that comes to an end." - ILN, 9/24/27
10. A Litigious Society
"The position we have now reached is this: starting from the State, we try to remedy the failures of all the families, all the nurseries, all the schools, all the workshops, all the secondary institutions that once had some authority of their own. Everything is ultimately brought into the Law Courts. We are trying to stop the leak at the other end." - ILN, 3/24/23
11. The O.J. Trial
o Scientific Evidence: "The ultimate effect of the great science of Fingerprints is this: that whereas a gentleman was expected to put on gloves to dance with a lady, he may now be expected to put on gloves in order to strangle her." - Avowals and Denials, 1935
o The Verdict: "Only poor men get hanged." - ILN, 7/17/09
12. Police Authority
"Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed." - What I Saw In America, 1922
13. Psychoanlysis
"Psychoanalysis is a science conducted by lunatics for lunatics. They are generally concerned with proving that people are irresponsible; and they certainly succeed in proving that some people are." - ILN, 6/23/28
14. Reproductive Rights
"Let all the babies be born. Then let us drown those we do not like." - Babies and Distributism, GK's Weekly, 11/12/32
15. Separation of Church and State
"Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it." - Autobiography, 1937
16. Urban Renewal
"Some people leave money for the improvement of public buildings. I can leave dynamite for the improvement of public buildings." Ð ILN 3-17-06
17. Vegetarianism
"A modern vegetarian is also a teetotaler, yet there is no obvious connection between consuming vegetables and not consuming fermented vegetables. A drunkard, when lifted laboriously out of the gutter, might well be heard huskily to plead that he had fallen there through excessive devotion to a vegetable diet." - William blake
18. Z.Z. Top
"You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion." - "How I Met the President" Tremendous Trifles
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