[Fairy tales] make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.

My brother, Cecil Edward Chesterton, was born when I was about five years old; and, after a brief pause, began to argue. He continued to argue to the end. I am glad to think that through all those years we never stopped arguing; and we never once quarreled. Perhaps the principal objection to a quarrel is that it interrupts an argument.

Marxism: The theory that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic motive, that history is a science, a science of the search for food.

I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man limited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification.

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.

The average businessman began to be agnostic, not so much because he did not know where he was, as because he wanted to forget. Many of the rich took to scepticism exactly as the poor took to drink; because it was a way out.

It may be a mere patriotic bias, though I do not think so, but it seems to me that the English aristocracy is not only the type, but is the crown and flower of all actual aristocracies; it has all the oligarchical virtues as well as all the defects. It is casual, it is kind, it is courageous in obvious matters; but it has one great merit that overlaps even these. The great and very obvious merit of the English aristocracy is that nobody could possibly take it seriously.