G. K. Chesterton

A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man.

I do not, in my private capacity, believe that a baby gets his best physical food by sucking his thumb; nor that a man gets his best moral food by sucking his soul, and denying its dependence on God or other good things. I would maintain …

All government is an ugly necessity.

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

I object to a quarrel because it always interrupts an argument.

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 …

Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.

The whole difference between construction and creation is exactly this: that a thing constructed can only be loved after it is constructed; but a thing created is loved before it exists, as the mother can love the unborn child.

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.

Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.

When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any.

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

Ritual is a need of the human soul — nay, it is rather a need of the human body, like exercise.

Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

I think that if they gave me leave, Within the world to stand, I would be good through all the day I spent in fairyland. They should not hear a word from me, Of selfishness or scorn, If only I could find the door,

There is one creed: 'neath no world-terror's wing Apples forget to grow on apple-trees.

The Christ-child stood at Mary's knee, His hair was like a crown, And all the flowers looked up at him, And all the stars looked down.

Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

Earnest Freethinkers need not worry themselves so much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the world has never seen.

There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.

He is only a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the Conservative.

The simplification of anything is always sensational.

The centre of every man's existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are …

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.