Gilbert K. Chesterton Rage Quotations

The word 'heresy' not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word 'orthodoxy' not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong

There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.

The average woman is at the head of something with which she can do as she likes; the average man has to obey orders and do nothing else.

I should favour anything that would increase the present enormous authority of women and their creative action in their own homes. The average woman...is a despot; the average man is a serf.

America has a genius for the encouragement of fame.

The average businessman began to be agnostic, not so much because he did not know where he was, as because he wanted to forget. Many of the rich took to scepticism exactly as the poor took to drink; because it was a way out.

There should be a burnished tablet let into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton cheese, and survived.

I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him - rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.

There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.

It is the first law of practical courage. To be in the weakest camp is to be in the strongest school.

The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines.

The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.

I do not know much about Mohammed or Mohammedanism. I do not take the Koran to bed with me every night. But, if I did on some one particular night, there is one sense at least in which I know what I should not find there. I apprehend that I should not find the work abounding in strong encouragements to the worship of idols; that the praises of polytheism would not be loudly sung; that the character of Mohammed would not be subjected to anything resembling hatred and derision; and that the great modern doctrine of the unimportance of religion would not be needlessly emphasised.

He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.

The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.

Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?

The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.

Courage is getting away from death by continually coming within an inch of it.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

Wait and see whether the religion of the Servile State is not in every case what I say: the encouragement of small virtues supporting capitalism, the discouragement of the huge virtues that defy it.