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"Whatever we may think of the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides, I am sure we all agree that it should be done with sterilized instruments."
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"The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble."
"At certain moments, the foot slips ; at others, the ground gives way. How many times had that conscience, furious for the right, grasped and overwhelmed him! How many times had truth, inexorable, planted her knee upon his breast! How many times, thrown to the ground by the light, had he cried to it for mercy!"
"There is a certain right by which we many deprive a man of life, but none by which we may deprive him of death; this is mere cruelty."
"Messages of instant gratification leads to a corrupt society."
"Very few people see their own actions as truly evil,... It is left to their victims to decide what is evil and what is not."
"When we bless one another we shouldn't expect returned favours because blessings have no strings attached and they hold no sorrow."
"Specifically, I'd like to debate whether cannibalism ought to be grounds for leniency in murders, since it's less wasteful."
"Max, you're the last of the hybrids who still has...a soul.' ... 'She doesn't have soul,' Gazzy scoffed. 'Have you ever seen her dance?"
Explore more quotes by Gilbert K. Chesterton
"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."
"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."
"Once men sang together round a table in chorus; now one man sings alone, for the absurd reason that he can sing better. If our civilization goes on like this, only one man will laugh, because he can laugh better than the rest."
"But the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency between the humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a Christian than there is between the humility of a lover and the rapacity of a lover. The truth is that there are no things for which men will make such herculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy. There never was a man in love who did not declare that, if he strained every nerve to breaking, he was going to have his desire. And there never was a man in love who did not declare also that he ought not to have it."
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