G.K.Chesterson

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Help! I am looking for a quote and I can only remember vauge details. I remember thinking it was profound. He said something about atheism or scientism,( he did not call it that.) being the opposite of what it proclaims. Something like" an X that wants such and such,and yet actively goes against it". I apologize for lacking details. I have become obsessed!! I really want that quote!
PS: DUH! on my part! Chesterton, not Chesterson!
 
Possibly this?:

"**The pragmatist tells a man to think what he must think and never mind the Absolute. But precisely one of the things that he must think is the Absolute. **This philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox. Pragmatism is a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist. Extreme pragmatism is just as inhuman as the determinism it so powerfully attacks. The determinist (who, to do him justice, does not pretend to be a human being) makes nonsense of the human sense of actual choice. The pragmatist, who professes to be specially human, makes nonsense of the human sense of actual fact.

To sum up our contention so far, we may say that the most characteristic current philosophies have not only a touch of mania, but a touch of suicidal mania. The mere questioner has knocked his head against the limits of human thought; and cracked it. This is what makes so futile the warnings of the orthodox and the boasts of the advanced about the dangerous boyhood of free thought. What we are looking at is not the boyhood of free thought; it is the old age and ultimate dissolution of free thought. It is vain for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss what dreadful things will happen if wild scepticism runs its course. It has run its course. It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin. We have seen it end. It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself. You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves. You cannot fancy a more sceptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world. It might certainly have reached its bankruptcy more quickly and cleanly if it had not been feebly hampered by the application of indefensible laws of blasphemy or by the absurd pretence that modern England is Christian. But it would have reached the bankruptcy anyhow. Militant atheists are still unjustly persecuted; but rather because they are an old minority than because they are a new one. Free thought has exhausted its own freedom. It is weary of its own success. If any eager freethinker now hails philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in Mark Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was just in time to see it set. If any frightened curate still says that it will be awful if the darkness of free thought should spread, we can only answer him in the high and powerful words of Mr. Belloc, “Do not, I beseech you, be troubled about the increase of forces already in dissolution. You have mistaken the hour of the night: it is already morning.” We have no more questions left to ask. We have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on the wildest peaks. We have found all the questions that can be found. It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking for answers."
 
Maybe this:

“If there were no God, there would be no atheists.”
 
Help! I am looking for a quote and I can only remember vauge details. I remember thinking it was profound. He said something about atheism or scientism,( he did not call it that.) being the opposite of what it proclaims. Something like" an X that wants such and such,and yet actively goes against it". I apologize for lacking details. I have become obsessed!! I really want that quote!
PS: DUH! on my part! Chesterton, not Chesterson!
This is not the quote you’re looking for…but it’s one of my favorite Chesterton quotes.

Chesterton was visiting NY City and was invited to a major theatrical opening by the owner. When he was waiting by the front door and a huge line was bending around the building…a lady snarled at him “The back of the line is that way!”
Chesterton (being a very large heavy man) remarked…“If you come around to this side maddam you will see I am at the back of the line.”
 
This is not the quote you’re looking for…but it’s one of my favorite Chesterton quotes.

Chesterton was visiting NY City and was invited to a major theatrical opening by the owner. When he was waiting by the front door and a huge line was bending around the building…a lady snarled at him “The back of the line is that way!”
Chesterton (being a very large heavy man) remarked…“If you come around to this side maddam you will see I am at the back of the line.”
That one I’ve never heard. But it is suspiciously similar to an anecdote that is widely known. During the early years of WWI, before Chesterton’s very serious illness, he was accosted by a patriotic female who asked “Young man, why are you not out at the Front” (in Europe, that is)? He replied “Madame, if you come around to my side, you will see that I am”.

It was about that time that he mused that given his size, the only part he might play in the war was would be to form part of a barricade.

I’m usually fairly good at locating sources for his quotes, but while the OP is vaguely familiar, I can’t recognize it.

GKC
 
Is it this one? 😃

“His was a simple faith: that science is always right so long as it confines itself to proving that religion is wrong.”

Or is it this one?

“What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one.”
 
I’d wager a hundred dollars that one could find, in the immense corpus of Chesterton’s works, dozens of quotes that fit the description that’s been given.
 
I’d wager a hundred dollars that one could find, in the immense corpus of Chesterton’s works, dozens of quotes that fit the description that’s been given.
Likely. I own most that corpus, as far as that portion available as published in book form, under his name. But I’d like to pin it down, if I could.

GKC
 
I found it!!!
“But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind; and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. . . . As a politician, he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then, as a philosopher, that all life is waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. . . . The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts; then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting, where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality; in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.”

― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
 
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