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"...but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not."
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"The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive."

"And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven."

"When a man is getting better, he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him."

"Taste is the only morality. Tell me what you like and I'll tell you what you are."

"Satan is never your well-wisher. Get the pleasure of making him annoyed on you by doing good deeds."

"Life is indeed terribly complicated-to a man who has lost his principles."

"If there is something to pardon in everything, there is also something to condemn."

"For when once people have begun to believe that prosperity is the reward of virtue, their next calamity is obvious. If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue. Men will leave off the heavy task of making good men successful. He will adopt the easier task of making out successful men good."
Explore more quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton

"I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act but I do believe in a fate that falls on men unless they act."

"Then the man smiled, and his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side, going up in the right cheek and down in the left.There was nothing, rationally speaking, to scare anyone about this. Many people have this nervous trick of a crooked smile, and in many it is even attractive. But in all Syme's circumstances, with the dark dawn and the deadly errand and the loneliness on the great dripping stones, there was something unnerving in it. There was the silent river and the silent man, a man of even classic face. And there was the last nightmare touch that his smile suddenly went wrong."

"The proper name for the thing is modesty; but as we live in an age of prejudice and must not call things by their right names, we will yield to a more modern nomenclature and call it dignity."

"There are books showing men how to succeed in everything they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books."

"When I had a look at the lights of Broadway by night, I said to my American friends : "What a glorious garden of wonders this would be, to any who was lucky enough to be unable to read."

"Men of science offer us health, an obvious benefit; it is only afterwards that we discover that by health, they mean bodily slavery and spiritual tedium."
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