Gilbert K. Chesterton Quotes About Progress

• Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Atheist, Optimism, Miracle

• Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Democracy, Progress, Majority

• The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Inspirational, Real, Mean

• Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Mean, Vision, Progress

• When men have come to the edge of a precipice, it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Believe, Men, Progress

• None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  People, Progress, Machines

• Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Reality, Men, Progress

• Progress is the mother of problems.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Mother, Progress, Problem

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2012). “The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton”, p.65, Ignatius Press

• Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Progress Of Society, Progress, Cult

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.135, Simon and Schuster

• To hurry through one's leisure is the most unbusiness-like of actions.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Progress, Leisure, Action

• My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Attitude, Boredom, Long

• This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Progress, Age, Minorities

• Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Progress, Looks

  "What's Wrong with the World" by G. K. Chesterton, (Part One: The Homelessness Of Man, Ch. 4), 1910.

• The past is not what it was.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Past, Progress, Cult

• The modern world is a crowd of very rapid racing cars all brought to a standstill and stuck in a block of traffic.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Block, Car, Racing

• Comforts that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out wholesale; and indeed, nobody nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space, quiet, decency and good manners, need be without anything whatever that he wants; or at least a reasonably cheap imitation of it.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Air, Space, Long

• I still hold. . .that the suburbs ought to be either glorified by romance and religion or else destroyed by fire from heaven, or even by firebrands from the earth.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Fire, Romance, Heaven

• The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is, the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of the mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Men, Swings, Ideas

• If we are bound to improve, we need not trouble to improve. The pure doctrine of progress is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Progress, Doctrine, Needs

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.82, Simon and Schuster

• But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing toward a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it particularly nasty.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Nice, People, Progress

  "Alarms and Discursions". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1910.

• Progress is the mother of all problems.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Mother, Progress, Problem

• The modern world has far too little understanding of the art of keeping young. Its notion of progress has been to pile one thing on top of another, without caring if each thing was crushed in turn. People forgot that the human soul can enjoy a thing most when there is time to think about it and be thankful for it. And by crowding things together they lost the sense of surprise; and surprise is the secret of joy.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Art, Caring, Thinking

• The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Block, Men, Evil

  "The Defendant". Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1901.

• Now it has appeared to me unfair that humanity should be engaged perpetually in calling all those things bad which have been good enough to make other things better, in everlastingly kicking down the ladder by which it has climbed. It has appeared to me that progress should be something else besides a continual parricide; therefore 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.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Dust, Sea, Humanity

  "The Defendant". Book by G. K. Chesterton, 1901.

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