G. K. Chesterton

The object of language is to be understood.

The love of the untried is truly the love of Nothing: Futurism is very near to Nihilism.

Art is a language, and not a secret language.

What's worthwhile to point out, first and last, is that Socialism is a tyranny; that it is inevitably, even avowedly and almost justifiably, a tyranny. It's the pretense that government can prevent all injustice by being directly responsible for practically anything that happens.

Some of the most civilized and highly organized cultures, like Carthage at its wealthiest, had human sacrifice at its worst. Culture, like science, is no protection against demons.

I am not afraid of opposition. My God is a God of battles.

As a matter of fact, the Conservative has exactly the same error as the Progressive. It consists in the fact that each of them allows truth to be determined by time. That is, he judges a thing by whether it is of yesterday or today or tomorrow, and not by what it is in eternity.

The glory of modern people is that they do really feel. Their only danger is that they cannot think.

Men are never more awake to the good in the world than when they are furiously awake to the evil in the world.

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.

When an Anarchist is poor he breaks laws; when he is rich he makes them. In neither case does he ever dream of obeying them.

Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.

The truth is that Irreligion is the opium of the people. Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world. But, above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world.

The most dangerous thing in this world is a Puritan who's broadening his mind. He's just like a barbarian who's broadening his empire. More & more things do, indeed, come under his consideration; but this only means more & more things come under his oppressing & depressing power.

If Christianity should happen to be true, then defending it may mean talking about anything and everything. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the proposition that Christianity is true.

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.