Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Every generation has the right to build its own world out of the materials of the past, cemented by the hopes of the future.

As times change, so do the way each generation see the world. It is rather like the way our generation came to see our grandparents' views on the Empire and colonies as outdated.

History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.

I think the British have the distinction above all other nations of being able to put new wine into old bottles without bursting them.

There are periods in history when change is necessary, and other periods when it is better to keep everything for the time as it is. The art of life is to be in the rhythm of your age.

Times change. Every generation has a new set of problems. Human nature is unmoved.

At some period, however, of their history, almost every people, now civilized, have consisted, in majority, of slaves. A people in that condition require to raise them out of it a very different polity from a nation of savages.

Civilization never recedes; the law of necessity ever forces it onwards

It is common to think of our own time as standing on the apex of human history.

We cannot pick a lifestyle and tell two generations after us to live like that. It is impossible.

The roots of great innovation are never just in the technology itself. They are always in the wider historical context. They require new ways of seeing. As Einstein put it, 'The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.'

What we have been raised to think of as inevitable - division and hierarchy, monotheism and nation states - actually accounts for less than 10 percent of human history.

In men this blunder still you find; all think their little set mankind.

Besides, isn't it confoundedly easy to think you're a great man if you aren't burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?

I think the misconceptions, there are certain people that are fixed in those with those beliefs, and been in those for twenty-five years, you're not going to change them.... What you've got to do is basically talk to the future about what you want to with the country.

I think if you went back to the eighteenth century and you asked a fifteen year old boy, 'Would you like to marry a woman who has had plastic bags needlessly inserted into her breasts?', that fifteen year old boy would probably be like, 'what's plastic?'.

Parents. Honestly. Sometimes they really do think the world revolves around them.

The arrogance of men never ceases to amaze me. You all think everything has to do with you, and every woman has to desire you.

At this point in history when all things which concern man and the structure and elements of history itself are suddenly revealed to us in a new light, it behooves us in our scientific thinking to become masters of the situation, for it is not inconceivable that sooner than we suspect, as has often been the case before in history, this vision may disappear, the opportunity may be lost, and the world will once again present a static, uniform, and inflexible countenance.

I think it's good to look at how people lived before, and then take the best bits of that culture and try to mix it in with your own.

Anyone who thinks that his time is too valuable to spend keeping quiet will eventually have no time for God and his brother, but only for himself and for his own follies.

People who talk only of themselves think only of themselves.

I'm concerned that the world is a mess. That's why when I wrote my last book, Let's Face It, I dedicated it to the younger generation because, let's face it, the world is in a mess. Right now, the young people will inherit that mess. I think we have to do everything we can.

I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him realised that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually die. But some is.

What were they thinking? 'It's an alien apocalypse! Quick, grab the beer!