G.K. Chesterton

I love, love, love G.K. Chesterton. He captures better in the following two sentences the point I was trying to make with this entire post.

"My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday."

Here are more of his classics. I could go on and on and on...

"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."

"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."

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."

"[W]hen Mr. H. G. Wells says (as he did somewhere), 'All chairs are quite different', he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms. If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them 'all chairs.'"

"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."

"Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not...in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination....The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."

"Self-denial is the test and definition of self-government."

"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."

"All the terms used in the science books, 'law,' 'necessity,' 'order,' 'tendency,' and so on, are really unintellectual .... The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, 'charm,' 'spell,' 'enchantment.' They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a MAGIC tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched. I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic."

"The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right."

"Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up."

"When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them."

"The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog."

"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."

"War is not the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you."

"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."

"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God."

"America is the only country ever founded on a creed."

"He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative."

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

"By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men."

"There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions."

"These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own."