There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past.
Interpretation
True courage involves confronting new challenges and injustices rather than attacking outdated ideas.
In this quote, Chesterton emphasizes that real courage is not found in easily opposing old traditions or ideas, but rather in standing up against current oppressions and prevailing superstitions. A true free thinker is someone whose mind is liberated from both the constraints of history and the pressures of the future, allowing for genuine intellectual freedom and moral bravery.
In practice
During a motivational speech about innovation and progress, you could use this quote to illustrate the importance of addressing contemporary issues.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
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.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
It is my position that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do. No matter how I look at this issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.
The right is ours. Have it we must. Use it we will.
The Western media has depicted the Afghan woman as a helpless, weak individual. I have said it before, and I shall repeat it: The Afghan woman is strong. The Afghan woman is resourceful. The Afghan woman is resilient.
Fear is a greater evil than evil itself.
I walk on the wire; it's my profession, and there are no two high wire walks alike.
If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation - and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.
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