Gilbert K. Chesterton

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.

Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache.

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

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

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

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

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

It is not funny that anything else should fall down only that a man should fall down. Why do we laugh? Because it is a gravely religious matter: it is the Fall of Man. Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.

The family is the test of freedom because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless.

Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young.

Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.

The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense.

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.

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