You cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it.

Cleanliness is not next to godliness nowadays, for cleanliness is made an essential and godliness is regarded as an offence.

There is no obligation on us to be richer, or busier, or more efficient, or more productive, or more progressive, or any way worldlier or wealthier, if it does not make us happier.

If I did not believe in God, I should still want my doctor, my lawyer and my banker to do so.

Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.

He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican.

Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists.