Chesterton

"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 the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."

"He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical."

"There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person."

"The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums."

"Journalism largely consists of saying 'Lord Jones is Dead' to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive."

"All slang is a metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry."

"Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist."

"The rich are the scum of the earth in every country."

"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people."

"The people who are the most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all."

"You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it."

"Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper."

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."

"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."

"The most astonishing thing about miracles is that they happen."

"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."

"An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered."

"By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece."

"I believe in getting into hot water; it keeps you clean."

"If there were no God, there would be no Atheists."

"My country, right or wrong," is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, "My mother, drunk or sober."

"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere."

"Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up."

"I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite."