"...I am not saying for a moment that new writers must not try new styles.  I am resisting the veto that they must not try old styles.  I am questioning this incessantly repeated suggestion, that certain particular images or cadences or conceptions have become impossible to any literary man, because he has the misfortune to live at this particular moment by the clock.  - "About Poetry"

"I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday."

"It is simply an unchanging quality in the nature of man that he is fickle, moody, and one-sided; that he stresses now one point in morals and now another, neglects one virtue and then goes on in progressive triumph to neglect another; that he is overpowered by whatever is recent and generally ignorant of whatever is remote; and, above all, that he mistakes experience for existence, and supposes that what he sees is all that there is to see. There certainly is in human nature this changing quality; and it is an unchanging quality."

 - "About Changing Human Nature"

"Men are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern."

"Logic and truth, as a matter of fact, have very little to do with each other...You can be as logical about griffins and basilisks as about sheep and pigs...The relations of logic and truth depend, then, not upon its perfection as logic, but upon certain pre-logical faculties and certain pre-logical discoveries, upon the possession of those faculties, upon the power of making those discoveries...Logic, then, is not necessarily an instrument for finding truth; on the contrary, truth is necessary for using logic - for using it, that is, for the discovery of further truth and for the profit of humanity."

"Love means loving the unlovable - or it is no virtue at all." - Heretics

"It has been often said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary." - Charles Dickens

"Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable."

"It is rational to attack the police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics of
religious authority are like men who should attack the police 

without ever having heard of burglars."

"It is commonly the loose and latitudinarian Christians who pay quite indefensible compliments to Christianity. They talk as if there had never been any piety or pity until Christianity came, a point on which any mediaeval would have been eager to correct them...They will think me very narrow
(whatever that means) if I say that the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it was the first to preach Christianity. Its peculiarity was that it was peculiar, and simplicity and sincerity are not peculiar, but obvious ideals for all mankind. Christianity was the answer to a riddle, not the last truism uttered after a long talk."

"According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free." - Orthodoxy

"I am myself a Liberal without any Liberal Party; a Little-Englander in the sense that I care more about England than about Newfoundland
or Tasmania; a Radical in all my instincts in the general social quarrels of our plutocracy; an ex-Socialist who is still enough of a Socialist to be a sort of revolutionist, and to regret that the Socialists have become as respectable as the Prime Minister; a Distributist who denies that any of the nineteenth-century parties of squires and merchants had the remotest notion of what was wrong with the nineteenth century, especially in England (for what was wrong was the absence of peasants, who are equally opposed to merchants and squires)..." - "About Political Creeds"

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