Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

There are two kinds of people in the world, the conscious dogmatists and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found myself that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic.

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

The modern world... has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

It is better to speak wisdom foolishly like the saints than to speak folly wisely like the deans.

Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway trains look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It is because they know that the train is going right. It is because they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!