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Phoenix
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Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before." - Tremendous Trifles
"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
"What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism." - Sidelights on New London and Newer New York
"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
"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
"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
"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 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
"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
"Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision." - Orthodoxy, 1908
"Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back." - What's Wrong With The World, 1910
"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." - Orthodoxy, 1908
"Comforts that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out wholesale; and indeed, nobody nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space, quiet, decency and good manners, need be without anything whatever that he wants; or at least a reasonably cheap imitation of it." - Commonwealth, 1933
"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 possible be alive." - A Miscellany of Men
"The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is, the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of the mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings." - "The New House" Alarms and Discursions
"War is not 'the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you." - ILN, 7/24/15
"There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting." - Everlasting Man, 1925
"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him." - ILN, 1/14/11
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." - Christendom in Dublin, 1933
"When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws." - Daily News, 7/29/05
"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." - ILN, 4/6/18
"It is terrible to contemplete how few politicians are hanged." - The Cleveland Press, 3/1/21
"It is a good sign in a nation when things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on." - "Patriotism and Sport," All Things Considered
"It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile." - The Judgement of Dr. Johnson, Act III
"I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that, while they are always talking about things as problems, they have hardly any notion of what a real problem is." - Uses of Diversity
"There have been household gods and household saints and household fairies. I am not sure that there have yet been any factory gods or factory saints or factory fairies. I may be wrong, as I am no commericial expert, but I have not heard of them as yet." - ILN Dec 18, 1926
"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." - "The Way to the Stars" Lunacy and Letters
"Love means loving the unlovable - or it is no virtue at all." - Heretics, 1905
"One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created." - The Boston Sunday Post, 1/16/21
"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people." - ILN, 7/16/10
"If there were no God, there would be no atheists." - Where All Roads Lead, 1922
"There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions." - ILN, 1/13/06
"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried." - Chapter 5, What's Wrong With The World, 1910
"The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man." - Introduction to the Book of Job, 1907
"It has been often said, very truely, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary." - Charles Dickens
"Theology is only thought applied to religion." - The New Jerusalem
"The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden." - ILN 1-3-20
"These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own." - ILN 8-11-28
"Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake." - Blake
"Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable." - ILN, 10/23/09
"It's not that we don't have enough scoundrels to curse; it's that we don't have enough good men to curse them." - ILN, 3/14/08
"There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth." - ILN, 7/18/08
"The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice." - ILN, 6/11/10
"Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it." - ILN, 2/24/06
"It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong." - The Catholic Church and Conversion
"There'd be a lot less scandal if people didn't idealize sin and pose as sinners." - The Father Brown Omnibus
"I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it." - ILN 8/4/06
"To the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sun is really a sun; to the humble man, and to the humble man alone, the sea is really a sea." - Heretics, CW I, p128
"Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified." - ILN 9-30-33
"The voice of the special rebels and prophets, recommending discontent, should, as I have said, sound now and then suddenly, like a trumpet. But the voices of the saints and sages, recommending contentment, should sound unceasingly, like the sea." - T.P.'s Weekly, Christmas Number, 1910
"All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive." - The Thing. CW. III 191
"Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities." - What's Wrong With the World
"What we call emancipation is always and of necessity simply the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another." - Daily News12-21-05
"There are some desires that are not desirable." - Orthodoxy
"In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn." - The Speaker 2-2-01
"A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter." - ILN, 5/25/31
"Business, especially big business, is now organized like an army. It is, as some would say, a sort of mild militarism without bloodshed; as I say, a militarism without the military virtues." - The Thing
"All but the hard hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it." - Utopia of Usurers, 1917
"Capitalism is that commercial system in which supply immediately answers to demand, and in which everybody seems to be thoroughly dissatisfied and unable to get anything he wants." - "How to Write a Detective Story." The Spice of Life
"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere." - ILN, 5/5/28
"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
"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
"The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense." - ILN, 9/7/29
"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
"Some people leave money for the improvement of public buildings. I can leave dynamite for the improvement of public buildings." ? ILN 3-17-06
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