“Only Calvinists can really believe that hell is paved with good intentions. That is exactly the one thing it cannot be paved with.”

—G K Chesterton.

‘The question is not so much “Are there foreigners in my country?” but “Are there cosmopolitans in my country, cosmopolitans who act in complete indifference to my country, and all other countries?”‘

—G K Chesterton.

“Humor is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game. It is meant to remind us human beings that we have things about us as ungainly and ludicrous as the nose of the elephant or the neck of the giraffe.”

—G K Chesterton.

“The child who doubts about Santa Claus has insomnia. The child who believes has a good night’s rest.”
—G K Chesterton.

“If a man uses a right wrongly, the answer is for everybody to use their rights rightly; not to give up all their rights on chance of curing the wrong.”

—G K Chesterton.

“A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense has really become very uncommon. Straightforward ideas appear strange or unfamiliar, and any thought that does not follow the conventional curve or twist, is supposed to be a sort of joke.”

——G. K. Chesterton.

“Everybody is talking, with a not unnatural excitement, about the wonderful opportunity which broadcasting will give us to send our words to a remote continent. Nobody seems concerned to ask whether we’ve anything to say even to the next street, let alone to the remote continent.”
—G K Chesterton.

“The teacher is allowed to say that twice two is four, not because it is less dogmatic, but because it is less disputed. In other words, education is easy when dogma is universal. It only becomes difficult when men are divided about dogmas.”
—G K Chesterton.

“Joking is undignified; that is why it is so good for one’s soul.”
—G K Chesterton.

“A man making experiments in chemistry must expect chemical explosions, and a man making experiments in ethics must expect ethical explosions.”

—G K Chesterton.

“It is obvious that all marriages are imprudent marriages; just as all births are imprudent births. If prudence is your main concern, or if (in other words) you are a coward, it is certainly better not to be married; and even better not to be born.”

—G K Chesterton.

“You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.”

—G K Chesterton.

“The command of Christ is impossible, but it is not insane; it is rather sanity preached to a planet of lunatics.”

—G K Chesterton.

“There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”

—G K Chesterton.

“When all are sexless there will be equality. There will be no women and no men. There will be but a fraternity, free and equal. The only consoling thought is that it will endure but for one generation.”

—G K Chesterton.

“Birth Control is mere blindness; you are destroying Shakespeares and Bacons and other great geniuses, for all you know, by every act of contraception.”

—G K Chesterton.

“Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.”

—G K Chesterton.

‘The difficulty of explaining “why I am a Catholic” is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.’

—G K Chesterton.

“I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him — rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.”

—G K Chesterton.

“Modern people insist on talking about Birth Control when they mean less birth and no control.”

—G K Chesterton.

“Yielding to a temptation is like yielding to a blackmailer: you pay to be free, and find yourself the more enslaved.”

—G K Chesterton.

“A moral standard must remain the same or it is not a moral standard.”

—G K Chesterton.

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

—G K Chesterton.

“Men are never more awake to the good in the world than when they are furiously awake to the evil in the world.”

—G K Chesterton.

“Opponents of Christianity will believe anything except Christianity.”

—G K Chesterton.

“This is, indeed, the supreme absurdity of the modern world, that it imagines that it can introduce anarchy into the intellect without introducing anarchy into the commonwealth. It imagines that it can make its thoughts go crooked and its motor-cars will still go straight.”

—G K Chesterton.

“Sport is not so much a modern relaxation as a new religion; and is more serious and unsmiling even than most new religions.”

—G K Chesterton.

“If free thought means that we are not free to rebuke free-thinkers, it is surely a very one-sided sort of free thought. It means that they may say anything they choose about all we hold most dear, and we must not say anything we think in protest against all we hold most damnable.”

—G K Chesterton.

“We do not hide ourselves in the universal night of pessimism. We are the optimists in revolt. If anyone cares to call us the Conservatives in revolt, the case for our revolt is all the stronger.”

—G K Chesterton.

“The test of democracy is not whether the people vote, but whether the people rule.”

G K Chesterton.