1,399 Quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

Aristocracy: government by the badly educated.

The materialist theory of history, that all politics and ethics are the expression of economics, is a very simple fallacy indeed. It consists simply of confusing the necessary conditions of life with the normal preoccupations of life, that are quite a different thing. It is like saying that because a man can only walk about on two legs, therefore he never walks about except to buy shoes and stockings.

Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

Let us not decide what is good, but let it be considered good not to decide it.

Playing as children means playing is the most serious thing in the world.

When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.

For fear of the newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for the newspapers.

Right is Right even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong even if everybody is wrong about it.