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Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?

— G. K. Chesterton The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

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More quotes by G. K. Chesterton

The humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together.

The Defendant (1901)

Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.

Briefly, you can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.

There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.

Charles Dickens (1906)

The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, and our attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong.

The Defendant (1901)

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

William Shakespeare As You Like It (1599)

One country, one constitution, one destiny.

Daniel Webster

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

Carl Sagan Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: G. K. Chesterton (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.