G. K. Chesterton

Chesterton (1874-1936), the English writer, was perhaps the greatest writer of prose never to have written a great novel. But, oh, how he could write sentences! And, as this sampling of his quotations shows, he justly deserved his title of "Prince of Paradox". Enjoy.

"Americans are the people who describe their use of alcohol and tobacco as a vice."

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions."

"'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no true patriot would ever think of saying.... It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober'."

"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."

"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."

"Do not enjoy yourself. Enjoy dances and theaters and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if you can enjoy nothing better; enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to the other alternative; but never learn to enjoy yourself."

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

"The only defensible war is a war of defense."

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

"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged."

"There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants."

"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."

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

"Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline."

"If there were no God, there would be no atheists."

"Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it."

"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."

"There are some desires that are not desirable."

"Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business."

"A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter."

"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."

"The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say."

"Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition."

"From time to time, as we all know, a sect appears in our midst announcing that the world will very soon come to an end. Generally, by some slight confusion or miscalculation, it is the sect that comes to an end."

"The ultimate effect of the great science of Fingerprints is this: that whereas a gentleman was expected to put on gloves to dance with a lady, he may now be expected to put on gloves in order to strangle her."

"Psychoanalysis is a science conducted by lunatics for lunatics. They are generally concerned with proving that people are irresponsible; and they certainly succeed in proving that some people are."

"A modern vegetarian is also a teetotaler, yet there is no obvious connection between consuming vegetables and not consuming fermented vegetables. A drunkard, when lifted laboriously out of the gutter, might well be heard huskily to plead that he had fallen there through excessive devotion to a vegetable diet."

"You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion."