What's Wrong with the World

by G.K. Chesterton

But exactly the whole difficulty in our public problems is that some men are aiming at cures which other men would regard as worse maladies; are offering ultimate conditions as states of health which others would uncompromisingly call states of disease.

If our statesmen were visionaries something practical might be done.

Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf.

all the men in history who have really done anything with the future have had their eyes fixed upon the past.

My point is that the world did not tire of the church's ideal, but of its reality.

Certainly, if the church failed it was largely through the churchmen.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

There is no new ideal imaginable by the madness of modern sophists, which will be anything like so startling as fulfilling any one of the old ones.

All modern thinkers are reactionaries; for their thought is always a reaction from what went before. When you meet a modern man he is always coming from a place, not going to it.

Revolutionists make a reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform. They never reform the reform, which is often very much wanted.

No wonder that our educationists are not horrified at a man picking up the aristocrat's second-hand trousers, when they themselves have only taken up the aristocrat's second-hand ideas.

The whole of this book has been a rambling and elaborate urging of one purely ethical fact.

Dirt is evil chiefly as evidence of sloth; but the fact remains that the classes that wash most are those that work least.