Gilbert Keith Chesterton Quotations

My country wrong or right, is like saying my mother, drunk or sober.

''My country, right or wrong'' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying ''My mother, drunk or sober.''

There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.

We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next door neighbor.

Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

White is not a mere absence of color; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. God paints in many colors; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.

There are no uninteresting things, there are only uninterested people.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes -- our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.

A stiff apology is a second insult. The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist see what he has come to see.

The world will never starve for want of wonders, but for want of wonder.

No man who worships education has got the best out of education.... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.

They have given us into the hand of new unhappy lords. Lords without anger and honor, who dare not carry their swords. They fight by shuffling papers; they have bright dead alien eyes; They look at our labor and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.

Do not free the camel of the burden of his hump; you may be freeing him from being a camel.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. He is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

A good novel tells us the truth about it's hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Among the very 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 egoistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.