Progress is Providence without God. That is, it is a theory that everything has always perpetually gone right by accident. It is a sort of atheistic optimism, based on an everlasting coincidence far more miraculous than a miracle.

You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.

The great intellectual tradition that comes down to us from the past was never interrupted or lost through such trifles as the sack of Rome, the triumph of Attila, or all the barbarian invasions of the Dark Ages. It was lost after the introduction of printing, the discovery of America, the founding of the Royal Society, and all the enlightenment of the Renaissance and the modern world. It was there, if anywhere, that there was lost or impatiently snapped the long thin delicate thread that had descended from distant antiquity; the thread of that unusual human hobby: the habit of thinking.

The Church is a house with a hundred gates: and no two men enter at exactly the same angle

There should be a burnished tablet let into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton cheese, and survived.

Half a truth is better than no politics.

A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.