Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity.

Scotsmen are metaphisical and emotional, they are sceptical and mystical, they are romantic and ironic, they are cruel and tender, and full of mirth and despair.

The Humanity of men and women is inversely proportional to their Numbers. A Crowd is no more human than an Avalanche or a Whirlwind. A rabble of men and women stands lower in the scale of moral and intellectual being than a herd of Swine or of Jackals.

Man is many things, but he is not rational.

We have yet to learn how to retain our humaneness when assembled in masses.

Girls are infinitely more complicated than boys, and women more than men.

As a human race, we have good people and bad people, and everyone has agendas.

A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly.

Harold could no longer pass a stranger without acknowledging the truth that everyone was the same, and also unique; and that this was the dilemma of being human.

A crowd is not merely impulsive and mobile. Like a savage, it is not prepared to admit that anything can come between its desire and the realisation of its desire.

To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.

The heart and the mind, what an enigma.

Everybody thinks of others as being excessively human, with all the frailties and crotchets appertaining to that curious condition. But each of us also seems to regard himself as existing on a detached plane of observation, exempt (save in moments of avid crisis) from the strange whims of humanity en masse.

I don't like human nature, but I do like human beings.

We are the spirit, the collective conscience. We create the pain, and suffering, and beauty in this world.

The magic will which makes us see the other side of our natures-dream and disaster, catastrophe and fulfillment-is the great permanent challenge of humanity.

Bad people are to be found everywhere, but even among the worst there may be something good.

It was hard to reconcile the drumbeats and lifted voices in the night with my memories of flames and the screams of dying men. How could humanity range so effortlessly from the sublime to the savage and back again?

We have need to be earth-born as well as heaven-born, gegeneis, as was said of the Titans of old, or in a better sense than they.

Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

Murderers are not monsters, they're men. And that's the most frightening thing about them.

I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea.

You are human and mortal; we are the sum of our weak moments and our strong.