G.K. Chesterton is one of my favorite authors. He just had such an abundance of common sense. These quotes are so applicable to today's world, that it's hard to believe that the man lived at the turn of the last century. Here's some of his quotes:
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions."
"A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."
"Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance."
"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."
"The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right."
"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."
"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 that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around."
"War is not 'the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you."
"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him."
"The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man."
"Love means loving the unlovable - or it is no virtue at all."
"If there were no God, there would be no atheists."
"There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions."
"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."
"Theology is only thought applied to religion."
"The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice."
"Truth is sacred; and if you tell the truth too often nobody will believe it."
"It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong."
"Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice."
"All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive."
"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."
"[No society can survive the socialist] fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them."
"We are learning to do a great many clever things...The next great task will be to learn not to do them.-
"Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it." –
"When people talk as if the Crusades were nothing more than an aggressive raid against Islam, they seem to forget in the strangest way that Islam itself was only an aggressive raid against the old and ordered civilization in these parts. I do not say it in mere hostility to the religion of Mahomet; I am fully conscious of many values and virtues in it; but certainly it was Islam that was the invasion and Christendom that was the thing invaded."
"There is no bigot like the atheist."
"Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle."
"There are arguments for atheism, and they do not depend, and never did depend, upon science. They are arguable enough, as far as they go, upon a general survey of life; only it happens to be a superficial survey of life."
"There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there."
"Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point and does not break."
The man of the true religious tradition understands two things: liberty and obedience. The first means knowing what you really want. The second means knowing what you really trust."
"I might inform those humanitarians who have a nightmare of new and needless babies (for some humanitarians have that sort of horror of humanity) that if the recent decline in the birth-rate were continued for a certain time, it might end in there being no babies at all; which would console them very much".
