"All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change."

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More quotes from: Gilbert K. Chesterton

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• "A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things. "
• "A room without books is like a body without a soul. "
• "A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be ..."
• "A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. "
• "A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition. "
• "A yawn is a silent shout. "
• "All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like ..."
• "All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry. "
• "An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly ..."
• "An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered. "
• "And they that rule in England, in stately conclaves met, alas, alas for England they ..."
• "And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, ..."
• "Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. "
• "Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. "
• "Artistic temperament is the disease that afflicts amateurs. "
• "Being "contented" ought to mean in English, as it does in French, being pleased. Being ..."
• "Brave men are all vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness ..."
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• "Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not ..."
• "Coincidences are spiritual puns. "
• "Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern ..."
• "Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking ..."
• "Cruelty is, perhaps, the worst kid of sin. Intellectual cruelty is certainly the worst kind ..."
• "Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated. "
• "Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing ..."
• "Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable. "
• "Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to ..."
• "Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not ..."
• "Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young. "
• "Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable ..."
• "Half a truth is better than no politics. "
• "Happy is he who still loves something he loved in the nursery: He has not ..."
• "How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win. "
• "I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean. "
• "I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but ..."
• "I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then ..."
• "I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles. "
• "I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. ..."
• "I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is ..."

• "I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees. "
• "If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man ..."
• "If I had only one sermon to preach it would be a sermon against pride. "
• "In matters of truth the fact that you don't want to publish something is, nine ..."
• "It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam. "
• "It is not funny that anything else should fall down; only that a man should ..."
• "It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it. "
• "It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the ..."
• "Journalism consists largely in saying "Lord James is dead" to people who never knew Lord ..."
• "Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and ..."
• "Journalism largely consists of saying "Lord Jones is Dead" to people who never knew that ..."
• "Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that ..."
• "Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair. "
• "Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. "
• "Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all. "
• "Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had ..."
• "Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of ..."
• "Marriage is an adventure, like going to war. "
• "Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger ..."
• "Men feel that cruelty to the poor is a kind of cruelty to animals. They ..."
• "Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist. "
• "'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying ..."
• "Never invoke the gods unless you really want them to appear. It annoys them very ..."
• "New roads; new ruts. "
• "No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle ..."
• "Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us ..."
• "Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my ..."
• "One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than ..."
• "One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak. "
• "People generally quarrel because they cannot argue. "
• "People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort ..."
• "Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. "
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• "The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and ..."
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• "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is ..."
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