Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Nothing is more difficult, in general, than to make a nation perceive anything as true, or seek its own interest, in any manner but as its forefathers have opined and acted.

Many people who attack me know so little of that larger Tradition, and end up being not very traditional at all. When you invoke the whole and great Tradition, you end up scaring people who call 1950 America "traditional" Christianity. It is just what they are used to in their one limited lifetime.

Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.

In the West the past is like a dead animal. It is a carcass picked at by the flies that call themselves historians and biographers. But in my culture the past lives. My people feel this way in part because death does not separate us from our ancestors.

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.

Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes --our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.

Tradition wears a snowy beard.

Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created.

The wisdom of our ancestors.

Where are the links of the chain ... joining us to the past?

The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. A pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention.

It takes a lifetime to build tradition.

The wisdom of our parents, grandparents, ancestors. In each individual life, it seems, we must first reject that wisdom, then later come to appreciate it.

History is the memory of time, the life of the dead and the happiness of the living.

The dead made this world. We didn't make it. They made the poetry and the songs and the customs.

(Tradition) is the democracy of the dead.

We need the rock of the past under our feet in order to spring forward into the future.

If we expect to inherit the blessings of our Fathers, we should return a little more to their primitive Simplicity of Manners.

I adore tradition. I cannot stand habit. Simply to repeat is nothing, also to destroy is nothing. Tradition is never interrupted, we are always evolving but never interrupted.

You cannot tear up ancient rootages and safely plant the tree of liberty in soil that is not native to it.

But a man is not forgotten, as long as there are two people left under the sky. One, to tell the story; the other, to hear it.

Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. Mind! I don't mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.

My father always said, "You don't know who you are until you know where you came from." That's one thing I always remembered. The other thing that my family always taught me was respect and reputation. You always respect yourself.

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.