Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes

Institutions-government, churches, industries, and the like-have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom; and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.

Government has crowded out the role of many social institutions, including the Church, that have been a great force for good in public life.

Unreason is now ascendant in the United States - in our schools, in our courts, and in each branch of the federal government. Only 28 percent of Americans believe in evolution; 68 percent believe in Satan. Ignorance in this degree, concentrated in both the head and belly of a lumbering superpower, is now a problem for the entire world.

Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist.

The not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self.

It is obvious to any observer that in every western country the increase of importance of public schools has been at least coincident with the relaxation of older family ties.

There is a point at which we begin to receive a diminishing return on the accumulation of sacred knowledge unless we use it to at least try to improve the world.

Put the money into schools. Rational ones that train young minds to think, to demand that persons in authority show the evidence for the ideas they push. Do that, and we won't need to provide a world for the Sacred Brethren who, given the opportunity, would run everyone else off the planet.

All my life I have painted pictures so that certain people would drop dead when they looked at them, but I have not succeeded yet. The worst painting cant hurt you, but a bad driver can kill you, a bad judge can send you to the chair, a bad politician can ruin an entire country, That is why even a bad painting is sacred.

As I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me.

Community. A friend started a real estate brokerage a few years ago. By the time she'd added her second employee, she was a pillar of her 35,000-person community. No rule says that only the local banker or car dealer can organize the program to raise supplemental funds for the public library or send the high school band on a well-earned special trip. Participating in community affairs, with time more than dollars, is good business from day one. It gets your name around, adds to your distinctiveness, and, best of all, makes you an attractive employer (which is the key to sustained success).

Who does not recall school at least in part as endless dreary hours of boredom punctuated by moments of high anxiety?

The worthy administrators of justice are like a cat set to take care of a cheese, lest it should be gnawed by the mice. One bite of the cat does more damage to the cheese than twenty mice can do.

I admire young people who are concerned with the affairs of their community and nation perhaps because I also became involved in struggle whist I was still at school.

I grew up in a middle class household with parents, went to good schools, and never feared for anything, never wanted for anything that was really important. For all of us living in this world, all of us who have the resources, for us to not dedicate ourselves to giving something back, is to leave the world a lesser place.

I didn't belong when I was in high school. Now people are trying to buy lips.

There is an ideological colonization we have to be careful of that tries to destroy the family.

The problem with education is school.

Grandfather always said school’s a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.

In Texas a high school student was arrested for bringing what authorities thought was a bomb to school but turned out to be a clock. Now the kid is in bigger trouble for carrying a device that could bring Texas into the future.

School prepares for the alienating institutionalization of life by teaching the need to be taught.

I went to Paterson Public School No. 6. At the time, it was the worst school in the city. Ain't nobody want their kids to go to School 6; it was that bad. But it was where we lived. If you grow up in a bad area, there are bad things around it.

I've found that I really don't like - as most people don't about school that there are subjects which are necessary to learn but you don't really want to learn on top of those ones that you do want to learn. So to take a class for me, a class or two on subjects that I'm really, really interested in and curious about would be awesome.

We really have to, as a country, recognize that school is where people get their identity not just as a scholar, or a future business person, but as a citizen. And we need to make sure that schools set them up for success as citizens.

Sometimes I think high school is one long hazy activity: if you are tough enough to survive this, they'll let you become an adult. I hope it's worth it.