Gilbert K. Chesterton Zitate auf Englisch

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We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The only way of catching a train I have ever discovered is to miss the train before.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They never feel that it is an injustice to equals; nay it is treachery to comrades.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over... is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Half a truth is better than no politics.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The only defensible war is a war of defense.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

Gilbert K. Chesterton