Men are never more awake to the good in the world than when they are furiously awake to the evil in the world.
We hear much today about modern books which "make you think." In my experience it is rather rare to find a modern book that even allows you to think. Modern books perpetually present, not the wrong answer, but the wrong question.
When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.
What some call the failure of Christianity, I should call the failure of those who chose to break up Christianity. —G. K. Chesterton twitter.com/Cyphre8/status…
Race has something to do with the entity called a nation, but history, conditions, religion, and education have a great deal more.
Christianity did NOT conceive of Christian virtues as tame, timid, and respectable things. It DID conceive of those virtues as vast, defiant, and even destructive things, scorning the yoke of this world, dwelling in the desert, and seeking their meat from God.
Where the human mind is not fed with any doctrine at all, it is simply at the mercy of the first mean sophistry or two-penny cynical generalization that it may hear from a fast schoolfellow or vulgar employer.
A horrible suspicion that has sometimes haunted me is that the Conservative and the Progressive are secretly in partnership. That the quarrel they keep up in public is a put-up job, and that the way they perpetually play into each other's hands is not an everlasting coincidence.
People generally quarrel because they cannot argue. And it is extraordinary to notice how few people in the modern world can argue. This is why there are so many quarrels, breaking out again and again, and never coming to any natural end.
America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature.
The terrible danger in the heart of our Society is that the tests are giving way. We are altering, not the evils, but the standards of good by which alone evils can be detected and defined.
The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.
Liberty, Equality and Fraternity have come to mean Plutocracy, Publicity, and Pornography.
Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.
Suppose Conservatism means the belief that the chief parts of human doom and duty are eternal, and should be protected or consecrated by permanent traditions; in that case I am a Conservative; and so was Robespierre.
This is why the new novels die so quickly, and why the old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal. But in the modern psychological novel the hero is abnormal.
The old idea of liberality was that it was a good thing that all the creeds should dispute freely; the new idea of liberality is that there should be no creeds to dispute.
It is obvious that all marriages are imprudent marriages; just as all births are imprudent births. If prudence is your main concern, or if (in other words) you are a coward, it is certainly better not to be married; and even better not to be born.