Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes About Politics

• For good or evil, a line has been passed in our political history; and something that we have known all our lives is dead. I will take only one example of it: our politicians can no longer be caricatured.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Humor, Evil, Political

• When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Mean, Office, Experts

  Illustrated London News, April 6, 1918.

• All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Change, Ideas, Political

  Orthodoxy (1908) ch. 7

• Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Mean, Government, Political

  New York Times 1 Feb. 1931, pt. 5, p. 1

• Half a truth is better than no politics.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Half, Politics, Truth Is

• When a man ceases to believe in god, he does not believe in nothing. He believes in everything.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Atheist, Believe, Men

• A nation is not going mad when it does extravagant things, so long as it does them in an extravagant spirit. But whenever we see things done wildly, but taken tamely, then the State is growing insane.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Taken, Long, Mad

• He is only a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the Conservative.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Heart, Liberty, Politics

  "Varied Types". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1903.

• Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Mean, Class, Giving

  Orthodoxy ch. 4 (1908)

• The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Political, Politics, Poverty

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.236, Simon and Schuster

• If the common man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Wisdom, Men, Past

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.336, Simon and Schuster

• All the controversialists who have become conscious of the real issue are already saying of our ideal exactly what used to be said of the Socialists' ideal. They are saying that private property is too ideal not to be impossible. They are saying that private enterprise is too good to be true. They are saying that the idea of ordinary men owning ordinary possessions is against the laws of political economy and requires an alteration in human nature.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Men, Law

• For the mass of men the idea of artistic creation can only be expressed by an idea unpopular in present discussions - the idea of property... Property is merely the art of the democracy... One would think, to hear people talk, that the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers were on the side of property. But obviously they are the enemies of property; because they are enemies of their own limitations.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Men, Thinking

• The Party System was founded on one national notion of fair play. It was the notion that folly and futility should be fairly divided between both sides.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Party, Humor, Play

• The man who says, 'my country right or wrong' is like the man who says, 'my mother drunk or sober'

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Mother, Country, Men

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