The earnest freethinkers need not worry themselves too much about the persecutions of the past. Before the Liberal idea is dead or triumphant, we shall see wars and persecutions the like of which the World has never seen. They need not reserve their tears for the victims of Bonner or Claverhouse (leaders of religious persecution […]
Gilbert Keith Chesterton Quotes
The chief mark of modern man has been that he has gone through the landscape with his eyes glued to a guidebook, and could actually deny in the one anything he could not find in the other… By a weird mesmerism, what people read has a sort of magic power over their sight. It lays […]
Veracity has nothing to do with violence, one way or the other. One historian may prefer to say, ‘The Emperor Nero set on foot several conspiracies against the life of Agrippina his mother, and expressed satisfaction when the final attempt was successful.’ Another may say, ‘The bloody and treacherous tyrant foully murdered his own mother, […]
They preach that if you see a man flogging a woman to death you must not hit him. I would much sooner let a leper come near a little boy than a man who preached such a thing.
A pacifist is the last and least excusable on the list of the enemies of society.
People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad… The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the […]
Not only does “orthodox” no longer mean being right, it practically means being wrong.
Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.
All men are ordinary men. The extraordinary men are those who know it.
Circumstances break men’s bones; it has never been shown that they break men’s optimism.
