'My country, right or wrong' is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'.
A dead thing goes with the stream. Only a living thing can go against it.
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying.
A man warmly concerned with any large theories has always a relish for applying them to any triviality.
A man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool.
A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too absurd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish.
A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.
A yawn is a silent shout.
All men are ordinary men. The extraordinary men are those who know it.
All men can be criminals, if tempted; all men can be heroes, if inspired.
All science, even the divine science, is a sublime detective story. Only it is not set to detect why a man is dead; but the darker secret of why he is alive.
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
Anyone who is not an anarchist agrees with having a policeman at the corner of the street; but the danger at present is that of finding the policeman half-way down the chimney or even under the bed.
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
Banking may well be a career from which no man really recovers.
Beware of no man more than yourself; we carry our worst enemies within us.
Business, especially big business, is now organized like an army. It is, as some would say, a sort of mild militarism without bloodshed; as I say, a militarism without the military virtues.
By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men.
Children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.
Compromise used to mean half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf is better than a whole loaf.
Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.
Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.
Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought.
Each generation of rebels in turn is remembered by the next, not as the pioneers who began the march, or started to break away from the old conventions; but as the old convention from which only the very latest rebels have dared to break.
Education is simply the soul of a society as it passes from one generation to another.
Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.
Fairy-tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
For in all legends men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible in a herd.
Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.
I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.
I do not believe in a fate that falls on men however they act; but I do believe in a fate that falls on them unless they act.
I may not practice what I preach, but God forbid that I preach what I practice.
I still believe in liberalism today as much as I ever did, but, oh, there was a happy time when I believed in liberals...
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
If I did not believe in God, I should still want my doctor, my lawyer and my banker to do so.
If men will not be governed by the Ten Commandments, they shall be governed by the ten thousand commandments.
If there were no God, there would be no atheists.
Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers, but creative artists very seldom.
Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.
In a world where everything is ridiculous, nothing can be ridiculed. You cannot unmask a mask.
In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don't know it.
It is a good exercise to try for once in a way to express any opinion one holds in words of one syllable.
It is better occasionally to call some mountains hills, and some hills mountains, than to be in that mental state in which one thinks, because there is no fixed height for a mountain, that there are no mountains in the world.
It is the test of a good religion whether you can make a joke about it.
It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
Let all the babies be born. Then let us drown those we do not like.
Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
Living in a world that worships swiftness and success no longer means living in a world of new things. Rather it means living in a world of old things; of things that very swiftly grow old.
Materialists and madmen never have doubts.
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.
Most men now are not so much rushing to extremes as sliding to extremes; and even reaching the most violent extremes by being almost entirely passive.
Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and violinist.
Not only does 'orthodox' no longer mean being right, it practically means being wrong.
Of a sane man there is only one safe definition. He is a man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.
One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.
One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.
One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.
Reason itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.
Satan fell by force of gravity.
Silence is the unbearable repartee.
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.
The church is the one thing that saves a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of his time.
The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G.K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.
The family is a good institution because it is uncongenial.
The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.
The historic glory of America lies in the fact that it is the one nation that was founded like a church. That is, it was founded on a faith that was not merely summed up after it had existed; it was defined before it existed.
The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.
The inner light is the shortest route to the outer darkness.
The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.
The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies.
The only sure way of catching a train is to miss the one before it.
The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.
The point of having an open mind, like having an open mouth, is to close it on something solid.
The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.
The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.
The rich are the scum of the earth in every county.
The successful businessman sometimes makes money by ability and experience, but he generally makes it by mistake.
The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.
The ultimate effect of the great science of Fingerprints is this: that whereas a gentleman was expected to put on gloves to dance with a lady, he may now be expected to put on gloves in order to strangle her.
The vulgar man is always the most distinguished, for the very desire to be distinguished is vulgar.
the way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.
Illustrated Londone News, April 19, 1924.
Illustrated Londone News, April 19, 1924.
The world is not lacking in wonders, but in a sense of wonder.
There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob.
There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.
There are two kinds of fires. The Bad Fire and the Good Fire. And the paradox is that the Good Fire is made of bad things, of things that we do not want; but the Bad Fire is made of good things, of things that we do want.
There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants.
There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting.
There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect.
There is but an inch of difference between the cushioned chamber and the padded cell.
There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape Nuts on principle.
There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.
There is nothing that fails like success.
There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.
To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.
To have a right to do a thing is not all the same as to be right in doing it.
Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.
Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.
Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.
Twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry 'We will not be dictated to'; and proceeded to become stenographers.
When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.
When you choose anything, you reject everything else.
Wit is a sword; it is meant to make people feel the point as well as see it.
Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.
Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.
You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.
You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.
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