Max Russo > Max's Quotes

“My country, right or wrong,” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Defendant

“To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Introduction to the Book of Job

“Psychoanalysis is confession without absolution.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Always be comic in a tragedy. What the deuce else can you do?”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Jesus promised his disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.”
― William Barclay, The Gospel of Luke - Enlarged Print Edition

“When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn't.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“In prosperity, our friends know us. In adversity, we know our friends”
― G.K. Chesterton

“People talk of the pathos and failure of plain women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“There is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill

“There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Blue Cross: A Father Brown Mystery

“The man who kills a man kills a man.
The man who kills himself kills all men.
As far as he is concerned, he wipes out the world.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged. ”
― G.K. Chesterton

“A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Your offer," he said, "is far too idiotic to be declined.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare