...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.

Christianity met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story.

We do not admire, we hardly excuse, the fanatic who wrecks this world for love of the other. But what are we to say of the fanatic who wrecks this world out of hatred of the other? He sacrifices the very existence of humanity to the non-existence of God. He offers his victims not to the altar, but merely to assert the idleness of the altar and the emptiness of the throne. He is ready to ruin even that primary ethic by which all things live, for his strange and eternal vengeance upon some one who never lived at all.

When a man ceases to believe in god, he does not believe in nothing. He believes in everything.

I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.

And we were angry and poor and happy, And proud of seeing our names in print.

For fear of the newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for the newspapers.