Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward - or go back. He who now talks about the 'freedom of the press' goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.

The 21st century will not be about the battle between capitalism and socialism but between the forces of progress and the forces of conservatism.

Leftism should be about the people. That's how it began.

Believe me, the intellectual revolution is going on, and that has to come first before you see the political changes. That's where I'm very optimistic.

Neither an ox nor a donkey is able to stop the progress of socialism.

If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years.

No matter how mistaken Communist ideas may be, the experience and knowledge gained by trying them out have given a tremendous impetus to thought and imagination.

I'm of the establishment but anti-establishment.

An excessive knowledge of Marxism is a sign of a misspent youth.

We are redefining and we are restating our socialism in terms of the scientific revolution.

The word Revolution, which we Socialists are so often forced to use, has a terrible sound in most people's ears, even when we have explained to them that it does not necessarily mean a change accompanied by riot and all kinds of violence

All socialists are either dumb or romantic.

The socialist or anarchist who seeks to overturn present conditions is to be regarded as attacking the foundation upon which civilization itself rests.

an out and out Socialist.

The social revolution of the nineteenth century can not draw its poetry from the past, it can draw that only from the future.

Since the Russian revolutionary movement finally took the path of open struggle against absolutism, the question of the socialists’ political tasks has become the most vital and most burning question for our party. Because of it people have drifted apart who had been attached to each other by many years of joint practical work, because of it whole groups and organizations have fallen to pieces. It can even be said that all Russian socialists have temporarily been split into two camps supporting diametrically opposite views on “politics”. Extremes were unavoidable in this matter, as always in such cases.

One of the reasons that change takes place is that the people who produce it believe change can take place.

The Socialist movement, the Labour movement, call it which you will, and the Women’s movement, are but different aspects of the same great force which has been, all through the ages, gradually pushing its way upwards, making for the reconstruction and regeneration of Society.

Any man who has the brains to think and the nerve to act for the benefit of the people of the country is considered a radical by those who are content with stagnation and willing to endure disaster.

If we always looked to contemporary public opinion we would be a slaveholding British colony today.

… all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.

Be skeptical, question authority, be a rebel. Do not conform and don’t be ordinary. Remember, all human progress is the result of far-sighted people challenging orthodoxy, tradition and rich, powerful, vested interests.

In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ...

In every revolution on Earth, consciousness came first.

The revolution of the proletariat was inevitable, good Marxists believed, but if so, why were they so eager to enlist us in their cause? If it was going to happen anyway, it was going to happen with or without our help. But of course the inevitability that Marxists believe in is one that depends on the growth of the movement and all its political action. There were Marxists working very hard to bring about the revolution, and it was comforting to them to believe that their success was guaranteed in the long run. And some of them, the only ones that were really dangerous, believed so firmly in the rightness of their cause that they believed it was permissible to lie and deceive in order to further it. They even taught this to their children, from infancy. These are the "red-diaper babies," children of hardline members of the Communist Party of America, and some of them can still be found infecting the atmosphere of political action in left-wing circles, to the extreme frustration and annoyance of honest socialists and others on the left.