My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.

What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business.

Marxism: The theory that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic motive, that history is a science, a science of the search for food.

I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him - rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.

Atheism is too theological.

The humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of all the bonds that hold the Cosmos together.

[V]ariety of climate should always go with stability of abode.... an Englishman’s house is not only his castle; it is his fairy castle. Clouds and colours of every varied dawn and eve are perpetually touching and turning it from clay to gold, or from gold to ivory. There is a line of woodland beyond a corner of my garden which is literally different on every one of the three hundred and sixty-five days. Sometimes it seems as near as a hedge, and sometimes as far as a faint and fiery evening cloud.