549 Quotes by G.K. Chesterton

There is something sinister about putting a leprechaun in a workhouse. The only solid comfort is that he certainly will not work.

A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man — the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle.

There is a tradition that jumping off a precipice is prejudicial to the health; and therefore nobody does it. Then appears a progressive prophet and reformer, who points out that we really know nothing about it, because nobody does it. And the tradition is thereby mocked - to the peril of us all.

The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more.

For even the most dehumanized modern fantasies depend on some older and simpler figure; the adventures may be mad, but the adventurer must be sane.

When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else's Bible?

I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.

The whole point of the Eugenic pseudo-scientific theories is that they are to be applied wholesale, by some more sweeping and generalizing money power than the individual husband or wife or household. Eugenics asserts that all men must be so stupid that they cannot manage their own affairs; and also so clever that they can manage each other's.

Eugenics, as discussed, evidently means the control of some menover the marriage and unmarriage of others; and probably means thecontrol of the few over the marriage and unmarriage of the many