Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

What used to be considered conservative values... are increasingly becoming more mainstream values.

Orthodoxy is a corpse that doesn't know it's dead.

A heretic can be tolerated. But a heresy cannot.

Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

A man must be orthodox upon most things, or he will never even have time to preach his own heresy.

As the language or vocabulary of photography has been extended, the emphasis of meaning has shifted, shifted from what the world looks like to what we feel about the world and what we want the world to mean.

I think that the influence towards suppression of minority views - towards orthodoxy in thinking about public issues - has been more subconscious than unconscious, stemming to a very great extent from the tendency of Americans to conform...not to deviate or depart from an orthodox point of view.

Squareness is such a uniquely intellectual disease.

I mean people -- people don't get -- they don't get smarter about things that get as basic as greed and you can't stand to see your neighbor getting rich. You know you're smarter than he is, and he's doing these things, you know, and he's getting rich, and your spouse is getting unhappy with you because you aren't doing -- pretty soon you start doing it. And so you get what I call the natural progression, the three Is. The innovators, the imitators, and the idiots.

Anyone who is different or is slightly out of the norm, is considered crazy.

Normal means lack of imagination and creativity.

(...) being right all the time acquires a huge importance in education, and there is this terror of being wrong. The ego is so tied to being right that later on in life you are reluctant to accept that you are ever wrong, because you are defending not the idea but your self-esteem. (...) this terror of being wrong means that people have enormous difficulties in changing ideas.

People without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort, culture and leisure, but of the use to which they are.

Doctrines like Christianity or Islam or Marxism require unanimity of belief. One dissenter casts doubt on the creed of millions.

The generality of men are so bound within the sphere of their circumstances that they have not even the courage to get out of them through their ideas, and if we see a few whom, in a way, speculation over great things makes incapable of mean ones, we find still more with whom the practice of small things takes away the feeling for great ones.

Every campus, of course, also has its rabble of young "liberals," who are forever making a din as they "demonstrate" for "world peash," "snivel rights," and the like, and who, if we may judge from their appearance and their yammering, are as afraid of war as they are of soap. I am sure that every student here present fully understands the importance of staying on the good side of the young "intellectuals" - I mean the windward side, of course.

I think that revolution means change. And if somebody feels like there's nothing wrong, everything's great even when it ain't, why would they ask for a revolution? Just stick the tubes into me and just pump away.

Too many are too obsessed by method. it becomes a dogma.

I did try to found a little heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.

Man is not permitted without censure to follow his own thoughts in the search of truth, when they lead him ever so little out of the common road.

Thank God for my hobgoblin, small-minded consistency.

I don't think playing it safe constitutes a retreat, necessarily. In other words, I don't think if, by playing safe he means we are not going to delve into controversy, then if that's what he means he's quite right. I'm not going to delve into controversy. Somebody asked me the other day if this means that I'm going to be a meek conformist, and my answer is no. I'm just acting the role of a tired non-conformist.

Civilization means conforming to a standard of behavior that may not seem natural to us.