Short quotes

[I've decided to make another "short quotes list", consisting of fairly short quotes by GKC, to keep them all in one place, like I did once before with a list of 50 such quotes. However, instead of trying to come up with many at one time, like I did before, I have decided simply to include them in this post as I come across them. So expect this list to be updated from time to time].

"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
-The Defendant (1901)

"It is a very good thing...to be frequently married again- always, of course, to the same person."
-Illustrated London News, October 9, 1909,

"The word 'good' has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of 500 yards I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man."
-Chesterton as Seen by His Contemporaries (quoted in)

"Brave men are vertebrates; they have their softness on the surface and their toughness in the middle."
-Tremendous Trifles (1909)

"When men really understand that they are brothers they instantly begin to fight"
-Utopia of Userers (1917)

"The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more."
-Orthodoxy (1908)

"Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind."
-Orthodoxy (1908)

"I have little doubt that when St. George had killed the dragon he was heartily afraid of the princess."
-The Victorian Age in Literature (1913 )

"Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling."
-Tremendous Trifles (1909)

"...there is no hope for men who do not boast that their wives bully them."
-Alarms and Discusions (1910)

"Greek heroes do not grin: but gargoyles do -- because they are Christian ."
-Orthodoxy (1908)

"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all."
-The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of pleasure"
-Twelve Types (1902)

"...we lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the 'lower classes' when we mean humanity minus ourselves."
-The Defendant (1901)

"Have we really learnt to think more broadly? Or have we only learn to spread our thoughts thinner?"
-Twelve Types (1902)

"The Bible must be referring to wallpapers, I think, when it says, 'Use not vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do.' "
-Tremendous Trifles (1909)

"Being educated means reading the newspapers. Being properly educated means not believing newspapers after you have read them."
-Boston Globe (quoted in)

"Experts in poverty (by which I do not mean sociologists, but poor men)..."
-Illustrated London News, March 25, 1911

"A real soldier does not fight because he has something that he hates in front of him. He fights because he has something that he loves behind his back."
-Illustrated London News, January 14, 1911

"A lot of men....could go on saying for days that something ought to be done...But if you convey to a woman that something ought to be done, there is always a dreadful danger that she will suddenly do it."
-The Secret of Father Brown (1927)

"For the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn't keep his word"
-"The Aristocrat" (1912)

"My last American tour consisted of inflicting no less than ninety-nine lectures on people who never did me any harm"
-Autobiography (1936)

"Men, they say, are now imitating angels; in their flying-machines, that is: not in any other respect that I have heard of."
-Alarms and Discursions (1910)

"The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it."
-All Things Considered (1908)

"...I use the word humanitarian in the ordinary sense, as meaning one who upholds the claims of all creatures against those of humanity."
-Orthodoxy (1908)

"Daybreak is a never-ending glory, getting out of bed is a never-ending nuisance."
-The Apostle and the Wild Ducks (book essays collected in 1975)

"...God Himself will not help us to ignore evil, but only to defy and to defeat it."
-Illustrated London News, April 14, 1917

"For religion all men are equal, as all pennies are equal, because the only value in any of them is that they bear the image of the King."
-Charles Dickens (1906)

-"Without education we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously."
-Illustrated London News, December 2, 1905

"Simple and uneducated people have no horror of physical monstrosities; just as educated people have no horror of moral monstrosities"
-Illustrated London News, December 16, 1905

"I gravely doubt whether women were ever married by capture. I think they pretended to be; as they do still."
-What's Wrong With the World (1910)

"Common sense, that extinct branch of pyschology..."
-Sidelights on New London and Newer York (1932)

"If the characters are not wicked, the book is."
-All Things Considered (1908)

"To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence."
-A Miscellany of Men (1912)