We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.

But the truth is that it is only by believing in God that we can ever criticise the Government. Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God.

...there is in life an element of elfin coincidence which people reckoning on the prosaic may perpetually miss. As it has been well expressed in the paradox of Poe, wisdom should reason on the unforeseen.

The home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.

The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world. Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness of a sick room. We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy, because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.

Bigotry may be roughly defined as the anger of men who have no opinions.

The scientific facts, which were supposed to contradict the faith in the nineteenth century, are nearly all of them regarded as unscientific fictions in the twentieth century.