Excuse me if I enjoy myself rather obviously! I don't often have the luck to have a dream like this. It is new to me for a nightmare to lead me to a lobster. It is commonly the other way.

[Marxism will] in a generation or so [go] into the limbo of most heresies, but meanwhile it will have poisoned the Russian Revolution.

Tolerance is a virtue of people who don't believe in anything anymore.

In a world flagrant with the failures of civilization, what is there particularly immortal about our own?

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.

But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit - and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist - and a Catholic.

In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood.