Chesterton on Liberals & Conservatives

“THE Liberal Party now consists entirely of leaders—or rather misleaders.”
 — The Well and the Shallows, 1935.

“A CLOCK that has stopped is at least right twice a day; the real philosophic Conservative is right with the same regularity as clock that has stopped.”
 — The Speaker, 10/19/01.

“BOTH modern parties believe in a government by the few; the only difference is whether it is the Conservative few or the Progressive few.”
 — What’s Wrong with the World, 1910.

“THE Conservative Party suddenly becomes the Liberal Party the instant it is liberated from responsibility. The Liberal Party suddenly becomes the Conservative Party the instant it has anything to conserve.”
 — Illustrated London News, 2/4/11.

“WHEN Conservatives, Liberals, and Socialists all agree, it is time for the larger and more harmless part of mankind to look after its pockets.”
 — Illustrated London News, 4/5/13.

“THE whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes being corrected.”
 — Illustrated London News, 4/19/24.

Chesterton on Politicians

“REPRESENTATIVE government has many minor disadvantages, one of them being that it is never representative.”
 — Charles Dickens.

"THE trouble with modern England is not how many or how few people vote. It is that, however many people vote, a small ring of administrators do what they please."
— Quoted in Colonist, 10/27/09

"I KNOW that most politicians are engaged in trying to imitate the other politicians, which cannot be considered as a school of virtue."
— Illustrated London News, 7/9/10

“I WOULD rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him – rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.”
— Illustrated London News, 8/31/12

“THE modern representative not only does not represent his constituents—he does not even represent himself.”
 — Illustrated London News, 8/31/12.

"THE men whom the people ought to choose to represent them are too busy to take the jobs. But the politician is waiting for it. He’s the pestilence of modern times. What we should try to do is make politics as local as possible. Keep the politicians near enough to kick them. The villagers who met under the village tree could also hang their politicians to the tree. It’s terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hung today."
 — Interview with Cleveland Press, 3/1/21

“POLITICIANS have to live in the future, because they know they have done nothing but evil in the past.”
 — Illustrated London News, 6/10/33.

"Modern people do worry horribly about..."

“THIS is the only period in all human history when people are proud of being modern. For though today is always today and the moment is always modern, we are the only men in all history who fall back upon bragging about the mere fact that today is not yesterday. I fear that some one in the future will explain that we had precious little else to brag about. For whatever the medieval faults, they went with one merit. Medieval people never worried about being medieval; but modern people do worry horribly about being modern.”

~G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, 3/12/32.

"Socrates is remembered"

“EVERYONE mentions Socrates as a man who dies because he was a bold exponent of new truths, but if you look closer you will see that something else is so. Socrates lived in a world of Sophists, and there were hundreds and hundreds of men proving that there was no God, no conscience. There were multitudes of anarchists around Socrates. He was the conservative who subdued them. He turned sophistry against the Sophists. Socrates is remembered. The rest are forgotten.”

~G.K. Chesterton: New York American, 2/13/21.

The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David.
Oil on canvas, 1787; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

"Representative Government"

“GOVERNMENT (and especially representative Government) now actually exists to protect those very abuses which Government (and especially representative Government) was actually created to prevent.

The plain, natural history of all political institutions is that you want a policeman to keep his eye on the traffic; but you also want somebody to keep his eye on the policeman. Parliaments, petitions, elections, juries, all the things that were ever rightly or wrongly called free institutions, all rest on the idea that we cannot put our trust in princes, because we cannot put it (without some balance of dispute and examination) in any child of man. But the Party System, as it is by this time, is quite the most cunning instrument for preventing such criticism ever devised by human ingenuity. It silences a criticism, it stops all self-purging, it turns back all repentance, and freezes all hopeful anger far more than the most brutal methods of the old tyrannies. The despot did dismiss a servant for cheating. The aristocrats did break a fellow-aristocrat for treason or cowardice. Common human annoyances could be counted on to kick common human nuisances.

Our method is much subtler. We set up one man and call him Liberty; we set up another man and call him Loyalty. If the first man becomes a tyrant, all who love Liberty must help him to tyrannise. If the second man betrays his country, all who love Loyalty must help him to betray his country. All other systems have left reform doubtful; this is the only system that has nearly succeeded in making it impossible."

~G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, 2/1/13.

"The standard of good"

“THE terrible danger at the heart of our Society is that the tests are giving way. We are altering, not the evils, but the standard of good which is the only standard by which any evil can be detected and defined.”

~G.K. Chesterton: Illustrated London News, 3/25/11.

"The real sceptic"

“THE real sceptic never thinks he is wrong; for the real sceptic does not think that there is any wrong. He sinks through floor after floor of a bottomless universe.”

~G.K. Chesterton: Lunacy and Letters.