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

People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.

A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter.

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.

It was the people who did not care who filled the world with fire and oppression. It was the hands of the indifferent that lit the faggots; it was the hands of the indifferent that turned the rack.

We are all in the same boat, in a stormy sea, and we owe each other a terrible loyalty.

A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason