The Story of the Family Quotes

“The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself. Other institutions must largely be made for him by strangers, whether the institutions be despotic or democratic. There is no other way of organizing mankind which can give this power and dignity, not only to mankind but to men.”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Story of the Family: G. K. Chesterton on the Only State that Creates and Loves Its Own Citizens

“The Story of the Family”. His first three points: The family is the most ancient of human institutions. It has an authority. It is universal.”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Story of the Family: G. K. Chesterton on the Only State that Creates and Loves Its Own Citizens

“The good artist is he who can be understood; it is the bad artist who is always "misunderstood.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Story of the Family: G.K. Chesterton on the Only State that Creates and Loves Its Own Citizens

“In short, our journalists do not realise that the human race has any respect for coherency of mind. It is not strange that their world has also lost all respect for that other sort of coherency which was called integrity.”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Story of the Family: G. K. Chesterton on the Only State that Creates and Loves Its Own Citizens

“The reason why our contemporary countrymen do not understand what we mean by Property is that they only think of it in the sense of Money; in the sense of salary; in the sense of something which is immediately consumed, enjoyed and expended; something which gives momentary pleasure and disappears. They do not understand that we mean by Property something that includes that pleasure incidentally; but begins and ends with something far more grand and worthy and creative. The man who makes an orchard where there has been a field, who owns the orchard and decides to whom it shall descend, does also enjoy the taste of apples; and let us hope, also, the taste of cider. But he is doing something very much grander, and ultimately more gratifying, than merely eating an apple. He is imposing his will upon the world in the manner of the charter given him by the will of God; he is asserting that his soul is his own, and does not belong to the Orchard Survey Department, or the chief Trust in the Apple Trade.”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Story of the Family: G. K. Chesterton on the Only State that Creates and Loves Its Own Citizens

“living there. That, he says, is what happens to each of us on the day we are born. That is how we enter a family. In a family, we have to get along with a group of people we did not choose to live with, which happens to be the same situation in our relationship with the rest of the world: “The men and women who, for good reasons and bad, revolt against the family, are, for good reasons and bad, simply revolting against mankind.”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Story of the Family: G. K. Chesterton on the Only State that Creates and Loves Its Own Citizens

“We are no longer in a world in which it is thought normal to be moderate or even necessary to be normal. Most men now are not so much rushing to extremes as merely sliding to extremes; and even reaching the most violent extremes by being almost entirely passive. . . . We can no longer trust even the normal man to value and guard his own normality.”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Story of the Family: G. K. Chesterton on the Only State that Creates and Loves Its Own Citizens

“There is a scene in The Man Who Was Thursday when the wandering poet Gabriel Syme strikes up a conversation with a policeman on a foggy evening along London’s Embankment. The policeman informs Syme that a strange “purely intellectual conspiracy will soon threaten the very existence of civilization, that the scientific and artistic worlds are silently bound in a crusade against the Family.”1 He goes on to say that the “most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher”.2 These destroyers of the normal “hate life itself, their own as much as other people’s”.”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Story of the Family: G. K. Chesterton on the Only State that Creates and Loves Its Own Citizens

“The disintegration of rational society started in the drift from the hearth and the family,” says Chesterton. “The solution must be a drift back.”
― Dale Ahlquist, The Story of the Family: G. K. Chesterton on the Only State that Creates and Loves Its Own Citizens