A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

I never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of is a vague popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one. When people talked about the fall of man, they knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't understand. Now they talk about the survival of the fittest: they think they do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean.

Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.

I am going to hold a pistol to the head of the Modern Man. But I shall not use it to kill him–only to bring him to life.

For fear of the newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for the newspapers.

It is always the secure who are humble.

Then I only wondered who put the toys in the stocking; now I wonder who put the stocking by the bed, and the bed in the room, and the room in the house, and the house on the planet, and the great planet in the void.