G. K. Chesterton

“What is the good of words if they aren't important enough to quarrel over? Why do we choose one word more than another if there isn't any difference between them? If you called a woman a chi...”

“I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.”

“The Reformer is always right about what's wrong. However, he's often wrong about what is right.”

“One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.”

“The historian has a habit of saying of people in the past: 'I think they may well be considered worthy of praise, allowing for the ideas of their times.' There will never be really good hist...”

“England and the English governing class never did call on this absurd deity of race until it seemed, for an instant, that they had no other god to call on… the truth of the whole matter is v...”

“This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.”

“Can it cure the one spiritual disease?” asked Father Brown, with a serious curiosity. “And what is the one spiritual disease?” asked Flambeau, smiling. “Oh, thinking one is quite well,” said...”

“It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that noth...”

“All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing - and he won't be missed either.”

“The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturi...”

“Culture, like science, is no protection against demons.”

“While most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of formin...”

“Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.”

“The truths of religion are unprovable; the facts of science are unproved.”

“There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.”

“The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.”

“There are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books.”

“I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered...”

“Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.”