Moral issues are always terribly complex for someone without principles. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
A dead thing goes with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals it is the modern strengthening of minor morals. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
What is called matriarchy is simply moral anarchy, in which the mother alone remains fixed because all the fathers are fugitive and… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
...it is not necessary to the child to awaken to the sense of the strange and humorous by giving a man a… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Every one on this earth should believe, amid whatever madness or moral failure, that his life and temperament have some object on… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
That all war is physically frightful is obvious; but if that were a moral verdict, there would be no difference between a… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Literary men are being employed to praise a big business man personally, as men used to praise a king. They not only… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Youth is always too serious, and just now it is too serious about frivolity. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted and only a few things forbidden. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Everyone seems to assume that the unscrupulous parts of journalism will be the frivolous or jocular parts. This is against all ethical experience. Jokes… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
For Scotland has a double dose of the poison called heredity; the sense of blood in the aristocrat, the sense of doom in the… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Faith is always at a disadvantage; it is a perpetually defeated thing which survives all conquerors. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
The triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these? — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place...The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a… — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
Plato was only a Bernard Shaw who unfortunately made his jokes in Greek. — Gilbert K. Chesterton Copy Share Image
