Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Our students wanted to know everything: but only the newest theory seemed to them worth bothering with. Knowing nothing of the intellectual achievements of the past, they kept fresh and intact their enthusiasm for 'the latest thing'. Fashion dominated their interest: they valued ideas not for themselves but for the prestige that they could wring from them.

I'm not one of these people who thinks everything in the past is great and everything modern is terrible. But I do think cities should be a mix of old things and new things.

The classic theology of my tradition comes from the French Renaissance. [William] Shakespeare was born in 1564, the year [John] Calvin died, and that theology was very influential in England in his lifetime. I think Shakespeare was attentive to questions raised by it, about human nature, history, reality itself. I find the two literatures to be mutually illuminating.

This then is the age of reason.

You don't want to know the Truth, you want to know the truth as you understand it. This is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment. You think you already know the truth! You think you already understand how it is. So you agree with everything you see or hear or read that falls into the paradigm of your understanding, and reject everything which does not.

We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.

Asked to make a list of the men who have most dominated the thinking of the modern world, many educated people would name Freud, Einstein, Marx and Darwin. Of these four, only Darwin was not Jewish. In a world where Jews are only a tiny percentage of the population, what is the secret of the disproportionate importance the Jews have had in the history of Western culture?

Indeed, this is an important characteristic of the globalization debate: the tendency toward glorifying all things indigenous even when they deserve to be left in the past.

We always think from where we come from. We always think from the sources that shape our understanding. I think about the world through the lens of my Islamic tradition. I accept this but I must also have intellectual humility.

I cannot think of a thing that was better in those good old days.

Far too often, when we think we are frightened by mystery, the fact is that we are haunted by history.

It was called the Middle Ages, the Dark Ages. If not for the monks, everything the world had ever learned would have been lost. Well, we live in a similar time, when we're losing the vast majority of what we do and see and learn. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Tradition - one of those words conservative people use as a shortcut to thinking.

The foundation for a new era was laid but yesterday. The human was given its first chance to become truly civilised when it took courage to question all things and made 'knowledge and understanding' the foundation upon which to create a more reasonable and sensible society of human beings.

"For even the most childish intoxication with progress will soon be forced to recognize that writing and books have a function that is eternal. It will become evident that formulations in words and the handling on of these formulations through writing are not only important aids but actually the only means by which humanity can have a history and continuing consciousness of itself."

I understand that and I have had very candid discussions with Saudi leaders in the past. I respect their culture and their heritage and their traditions, but I think that they now, as they move forward, will have to start examining these traditions and these practices to see whether or not change is appropriate.

I think there is going to be a large paradigm shift in a few years, and it could either be to a new age of enlightenment and unity and we'll be raised to a new level of consciousness, or it could be a return to a dark age of kings and mass, open oppression followed by a die-off of human culture.

You can't be unique any way. Music is made from seven notes. You will always come back to something. Even if you think you are unique, you will come back to something that existed before you were doing what you are doing.

Civilization is an active deposit which is formed by the combustion of the Present with the Past. Neither in countries without a Present nor in those without a Past is it to be discovered.

Education would be a divine thing, if it did nothing more than help us to think and love great thoughts instead of little thoughts.

In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.

We think we know what we are doing. We have always thought so. We never seem to acknowledge that we have been wrong in the past, and so might be wrong in the future. Instead, each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking by less able minds - and then confidently embarks on fresh errors of its own.

The natural/supernatural distinction itself, and the near-equation of 'supernatural' with 'superstition', are scarecrows that Enlightenment thought has erected in its fields to frighten away anyone following the historical argument where it leads. It is high time the birds learned to take no notice.