Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Certainly none of the advances made in civilization has been due to counterrevolutionaries and advocates of the status quo.

Resistance to improvement contradicts the noblest instincts of the race. It begets its opposite. The fanaticism of reform is only the raging of the accumulated waters caused by the obstructions which an ultra conservatism has thrown across the stream of progress; and revolution itself is but the sudden overwhelming and sweeping away of impediments that should have been seasonably removed.

Our story, Maryland's story, is the story of better choices and better results.

I can't let time move on without fighting tooth and nail and hopefully being a part of a revolution that is positive.

But we are not in the world to be good but to change it.

Healthy discontent is the prelude to progress.

Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be, as the egg is to the fowl; we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.

The march of progress must continue.

Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving.

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.

The fact is that racism, despite all the doomsayers, has diminished.

Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear.

There is this constant effort to progress in America, to make things better for everyone.

Reform starts here.

I am a friend to the reformation generally of whatever can be made better

In the political, the social, the economic, even the cultural sphere, the revolutions of our time have been revolutions "against" rather than revolutions "for"... On the whole throughout this period the man--or party--that stood for doing the positive has usually cut a pathetic figure; well meaning but ineffectual, civilized but unrealistic, he was suspect alike to (by both) the ultras of destruction and the ultras of preservation and restoration.

All political action aims at either preservation or change.

The people generally get accustomed to the established order of things and begin to tremble at the very idea of a change. It is this lethargical spirit that needs be replaced by the revolutionary spirit. Otherwise degeneration gains the upper hand and the whole humanity is led stray by the reactionary forces. Such a state of affairs leads to stagnation and paralysis in human progress. The spirit of Revolution should always permeate the soul of humanity, so that the reactionary forces may not accumulate to check its eternal onward march.

America is a conservative country with a small “c” - they want change, but they don’t want too much change too fast.

A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted — in the air. A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest — at the command — of his head.

Every conservative policy, however, is fated from the start to fail; after all, its essence is to stop something unstoppable, to resist a development that cannot be impeded.

Progress is never accepted by everybody.

Conservatives want to keep things as they are, while revolutionists turn things upside down.

Revolutions never go backward.

All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone, you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone, you leave it to a torrent of change.