Chesterton loved paradoxes. He could turn phrases and ideas like normal people roll ice around on their tongues. Part poet, part jester, he was like a five year old wielding a broad sword. The problem with paradoxes is that they never encompass the truth, they only get us to look at it in different ways. At best they're tools for dismantling functional fixedness, at worst they're smokescreens for bad arguments. Chesterton knew this, but he often got carried away. It's a shame too, because he makes some damn fine arguments and exposes a lot of nonsense considered foundational to modern thought by using paradoxes. But alas style is not content and artifice is not architecture. To put it punctiliously. .. . paradoxically it was his paradoxes that cost him the respect that his ideas deserved (wink). Still, I think he stands as one of the great thinkers of the modern age and points a way through for Christians to think about the present intellectual climate we inhabit.

"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions."
"To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it."
"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."

-----G.K. Chesterton