When once you have got hold of a vulgar joke, you may be certain that you have got hold of a subtle and spiritual idea.

The reason that angels fly is that they take themselves so lightly.

He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.

...but this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk about treating crime as disease, about making prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active choice whereas disease is not.

I never said a word against eminent men of science. 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. When people talked about the fall of man, they knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't understand. Now they talk about the survival of the fittest: they think they do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean.

People decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.

As long as the vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.