Barbarism is “the destruction of all that men have ever understood, by men who do not understand it.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News August 5, 1933, quoted in Gilbert! Vol. 6 #1 (September 2002)
“The true cost of something is what you give up to get it”
The definition of “opportunity cost” at www.economist.com/research/Economics/, quoted by Jason Clemens and Niels Veldhuis in Fraser Forum March 2006
“he [Samuel Johnson] never thought he was right without being ready to give battle; he never thought he was wrong without being ready to ask pardon.”
G.K. Chesterton “The Real Dr. Johnson”
“Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed.”
Emily Dickenson
“Anyone with only a week to live will not find it in his interest to believe that all this is just a matter of chance. Now, if we were not bound by our passions, a week and a hundred years would come to the same thing.”
Pascal Pensées
“If a man really cannot make a fool of himself, we may be quite certain that the effort is superfluous.”
G.K. Chesterton in “A Defence of Heraldry” in The Defendant
"His character was of an average kind, rather free from vices than distinguished by virtues."
Tacitus
“And savagery is not history: it is either the beginning of history or the end of it.”
G.K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas