The position we have now reached is this: starting from the State, we try to remedy the failures of all the families, all the nurseries, all the schools, all the workshops, all the secondary institutions that once had some authority of their own. Everything is ultimately brought into the Law Courts. We are trying to stop the leak at the other end.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

Before the Roman came to Rye or out to severn strode, / The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.

We are learning to do a great many clever things. The next great task will be to learn not to do them.

There should be a burnished tablet let into the ground on the spot where some courageous man first ate Stilton cheese, and survived.

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

The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.