A Short History of England Quotes

“I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England

“I do not, in my private capacity, believe that a baby gets his best physical food by sucking his thumb; nor that a man gets his best moral food by sucking on his soul, and denying its dependence on God or other good things. I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England

“The past is not what it was.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England

“They are constantly colonists and emigrants ; they have the name of being at home in every country. But they are in exile in their own country. They are torn between love of home and love of
something else; of which the sea may be the explanation or may be only the symbol. It is also found in a nameless nursery rhyme which is the finest line in English literature and the dumb refrain of all English poems, 'Over the hills and far away.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England

“Christianity is not a creed for good men, but for men.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England

“The truth is that the old parliamentary oligarchy[Pg 227] abandoned their first line of trenches because they had by that time constructed a second line of defence. It consisted in the concentration of colossal political funds in the private and irresponsible power of the politicians, collected by the sale of peerages and more important things, and expended on the jerrymandering of the enormously expensive elections. In the presence of this inner obstacle a vote became about as valuable as a railway ticket when there is a permanent block on the line. The façade and outward form of this new secret government is the merely mechanical application of what is called the Party System. The Party System does not consist, as some suppose, of two parties, but of one. If there were two real parties, there could be no system.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Short History Of England

“It is almost necessary to say nowadays that a saint means a very good man. The notion of an eminence merely moral, consistent with complete stupidity or unsuccess, is a revolutionary image grown unfamiliar by its very familiarity, and needing, as do so many things of this older society, some almost preposterous modern parallel to give its original freshness and point. If we entered a foreign town and found a pillar like the Nelson Column, we should be surprised to learn that the hero on the top of it had been famous for his politeness and hilarity during a chronic toothache. If a procession came down the street with a brass band and a hero on a white horse, we should think it odd to be told that he had been very patient with a half-witted maiden aunt. Yet some such pantomime impossibility is the only measure of the innovation of the Christian idea of a popular and recognized saint. It must especially be realized that while this kind of glory was the highest, it was also in a sense the lowest. The materials of it were almost the same as those of labour and domesticity: it did not need the sword or sceptre, but rather the staff or spade. It was the ambition of poverty. All this must be approximately visualized before we catch a glimpse of the great effects of the story which lay behind the Canterbury Pilgrimage.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England

“Mary had the solitary and heroic half-virtue of the Tudors: she was a patriot. But patriots are often pathetically behind the times; for the very fact that they dwell on old enemies often blinds them to new ones.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England

“If we really want to know what was strongest in the twelfth century, it is no bad way to ask what remained of it in the fourteenth. When the average reader turns to the Canterbury Tales, which are still as amusing as Dickens yet as mediæval as Durham Cathedral, what is the very first question to be asked? Why, for instance, are they called Canterbury Tales; and what were the pilgrims doing on the road to Canterbury? They were, of course, taking part in a popular festival like a modern public holiday, though much more genial and leisurely. Nor are we, perhaps, prepared to accept it as a self-evident step in progress that their holidays were derived from saints, while ours are dictated by bankers.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England

“Most of the mediæval remains familiar to the modern reader are necessarily “late,” such as Chaucer or the Robin Hood ballads; but they are none the less, to a wiser criticism, worthy of attention and even trust. That which lingers after an epoch is generally that which lived most luxuriantly in it. It is an excellent habit to read history backwards. It is far wiser for a modern man to read the Middle Ages backwards from Shakespeare, whom he can judge for himself, and who yet is crammed with the Middle Ages, than to attempt to read them forwards from Cædmon, of whom he can know nothing, and of whom even the authorities he must trust know very little.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England

“they had none of the modern romanticism which makes liberty akin to loneliness.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England

“all government is an ugly necessity;”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England

“As a rule its cruelty to the strong is kindness to the weak.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England

“a Church was to these men rather a world they lived in than a building to which they went.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England

“the other name of Justice has sometimes been Terror.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England

“the man who treats every human inconsistency as a hypocrisy is himself a hypocrite about his own inconsistencies.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England

“It is sometimes valuable to have enough imagination to unlearn as well as to learn.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England

“There is a joke about a Benedictine monk who used the common grace of Benedictus benedicat, whereupon the unlettered Franciscan triumphantly retorted Franciscus Franciscat.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Short History of England: From the Roman Times to the World War I

“We talk, with a humiliation too rare with us, about our dubious part in the secession of America. Whether it increase or decrease the humiliation I do not know; but I strongly suspect that we had very little to do with it. I believe we counted for uncommonly little in the case. We did not really drive away the American colonists, nor were they driven. They were led on by a light that went before.”
― G.K. Chesterton, A Short History Of England