The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (Illustrated)

by G.K. Chesterton

That old gentleman with the wild, white beard and the wild, white hat—that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was the cause of philosophy in others.

Yet these new women would always pay to a man the extravagant compliment which no ordinary woman ever pays to him, that of listening while he is talking.

"An artist is identical with an anarchist," he cried. "You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist.

Yes, the poet will be discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet is always in revolt."

We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men;

merely anarchists; that is, men who believe that rules and formulas have destroyed human happiness. They believe that all the evil results of human crime are the results of the system that has called it crime. They do not believe that the crime creates the punishment. They believe that the punishment has created the crime.

"Every man knows in his heart," he said, "that nothing is worth doing."

"After all," he said to himself, "I am more than a devil; I am a man. I can do the one thing which Satan himself cannot do—I can die,"

The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists, as you can see from the barons' wars."

"No," said the hopeless Inspector, "the human being will soon be extinct. We are the last of mankind."

"What does it matter who is mad or who is sane? We shall all be dead soon."

I am a Buddhist, I suppose; and Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt.

The philosopher may sometimes love the infinite; the poet always loves the finite. For him the great moment is not the creation of light, but the creation of the sun and moon.

The only crime of the Government is that it governs. The unpardonable sin of the supreme power is that it is supreme.