It all started with watching this great clip:
At the end there was a quote by G.K. Chesterton. So I googled.
And found my own favorites. Now, G.K. Chesterton certainly had quotes that were hideous, too. But, I design his craft to work with how I feel, I discriminate:
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions."
"What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism."
"Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance."
"Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it."
"Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish."
"When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven't got any."
"The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a
desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are."
- I love you Karen!!
"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."
"All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing."
"The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog."
"Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it."
- I find this true, which is peculiar since last night I formulated the opposite thought.
Because Hitler made his way with emotion and not reasoning. (So did Bush)
"Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision."
"There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting."
"The only defensible war is a war of defense."
- Which is why the USA attacked Iraq in "self-defence".
"When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it."
"I have formed a very clear conception of patriotism. I have generally found it thrust into the foreground by some fellow who has something to hide in the background. I have seen a great deal of patriotism; and I have generally found it the last refuge of the scoundrel."
"It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote."
"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."
"By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men."
"The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies."
"Self-denial is the test and definition of self-government."
"Love means loving the unlovable - or it is no virtue at all."
"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people."
"The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man."
"Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate."
- I may not agree with christianity, but this was well said.
"Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable."
"There is a case for telling the truth; there is a case for avoiding the scandal; but there is no possible defense for the man who tells the scandal, but does not tell the truth."
"Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks."
"I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it."
"Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities."
"If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty."
"The world will very soon be divided, unless I am mistaken, into those who still go on explaining our success, and those somewhat more intelligent who are trying to explain our failure."
"What we call emancipation is always and of necessity simply the free choice of the soul between one set of limitations and another."
"There are some desires that are not desirable."
"In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn."
"Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else."
"Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business."
"Price is a crazy and incalculable thing, while Value is an intrinsic and indestructible thing."
"Business, especially big business, is now organized like an army. It is, as some would say, a sort of mild militarism without bloodshed; as I say, a militarism without the military virtues."
"All but the hard hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it."
- Yes we suffer with the rich, poor souls!
"From the standpoint of any sane person, the present problem of capitalist concentration is not only a question of law, but of criminal law, not to mention criminal lunacy."
"From the standpoint of any sane person, the present problem of capitalist concentration is not only a question of law, but of criminal law, not to mention criminal lunacy."
"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."
"The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms."
- Feed us! Feed us!
"And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads."
"The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say."
"Modern man is staggering and losing his balance because he is being pelted with little pieces of alleged fact which are native to the newspapers; and, if they turn out not to be facts, that is still more native to newspapers."