What's Wrong with the World

by G.K. Chesterton

We all feel angry with an irreligious priesthood; but some of us would go mad with disgust at a really religious one.

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

History does not consist of completed and crumbling ruins; rather it consists of half-built villas abandoned by a bankrupt-builder. This world is more like an unfinished suburb than a deserted cemetery.

Men have not got tired of Christianity; they have never found enough Christianity to get tired of.

The simple key to the power of our upper classes is this: that they have always kept carefully on the side of what is called Progress. They have always been up to date, and this comes quite easy to an aristocracy. For the aristocracy are the supreme instances of that frame of mind of which we spoke just now. Novelty is to them a luxury verging on a necessity. They, above all, are so bored with the past and with the present, that they gape, with a horrible hunger, for the future.

Women speak to each other; men speak to the subject they are speaking about. Many an honest man has sat in a ring of his five best friends under heaven and forgotten who was in the room while he explained some system. This is not peculiar to intellectual men; men are all theoretical, whether they are talking about God or about golf.

Seemingly from the dawn of man all nations have had governments; and all nations have been ashamed of them.