Great Throughts Treasury

"From the towns all Inns have been driven: from the villages most... Change your hearts or you will lose your Inns and you will deserve to have lost them. But when you have lost your Inns drown your empty selves, for you will have lost the last of England."

"Gentlemen, I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This [taking a rosary out of his pocket] is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank Godthat He has spared me the indignity of being your representative."

"Great artistic talent in any direction... is hardly inherent to the man. It comes and goes; it is often possessed only for a short phase in his life; it hardly ever colors his character as a whole and has nothing to do with the moral and intellectual stuff of the mind and soul. Many great artists, perhaps most great artists, have been poor fellows indeed, whom to know was to despise."

"Had there been any existent vital and energetic institution left in Society after the Reformation for the use of small property in coordinated form-that is, in combination, so that the average man's holding could be put to useful purpose in company with the holdings of a great number of other men of his own sort, the new evils would not have arisen."

"He [the poet] brings out the inner part of things and presents them to men in such a way that they cannot refuse but must accept it. But how the mere choice and rhythm of words should produce so magical an effect no one has yet been able to comprehend, and least of all the poets themselves."

"He served his god so faithfully and well that now he sees him face to face in hell."

"Here richly, with ridiculous display, the Politician's corpse was laid away. While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged."

"Heresy is the dislocation of a complete and self-supporting scheme by the introduction of a novel denial of some essential part therein."

"How on earth could that be done? If you try to laugh and say 'No' at the same time, it sounds like neighing - yet people are perpetually doing it in novels. If they did it in real life they would be locked up."

"I am a Catholic. As far as possible I go to Mass every day. This is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative!"

"I always like to associate with a lot of priests because it makes me understand anti-clerical things so well."

"How did the party go in Portman Square? I cannot tell you; Juliet was not there. And how did Lady Gaster's party go? Juliet was next me and I do not know."

"I am writing a book about the Crusades so dull that I can scarcely write it."

"How slow the shadow creeps: but when 'tis past How fast the shadows fall. How fast! How fast!"

"I forget the name of the place; I forget the name of the girl; but the wine was Chambertin."

"I recognized that I was (and I confessed) in that attitude of the mind wherein men admit mortality; something had already passed from me?I mean that fresh and vigorous morning of the eyes wherein the beauty of this land had been reflected as in a tiny mirror of burnished silver. Youth was gone out apart; it was loved and regretted, and therefore no longer possessed."

"I shoot the Hippopotamus with bullets made of platinum, because if I use leaden ones his hide is sure to flatten 'em."

"I put my pencil upon the paper, doubtfully, and drew little lines, considering my theme. But I would not long hesitate in this manner, for I knew that all creation must be chaos first, and then gestures in the void before it can cast out the completed thing."

"I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged."

"I have noticed that this kind of fanatic, like every other kind, is in two species: the species which too clearly thinks out its own insane theory, and the species which remains perfectly muddle-headed."

"I have noticed that wherever the evils and perils of the Modern Scientific Spirit are attacked, those wounded in the attack and wincing from the pain of it raise, almost always, the cry that Science is being attacked; just as men who propose some foolish war in which the national finances may go under and which can be, even if victorious, of no profit, shriek that those opposing their policy are no patriots; just as a drunkard in his last stages still complains that those who would wean him from his mortal vice are the enemies of good-fellowship. I will bargain that of those few who have done me the honor of reading or skimming through this very long essay, some goodly proportion will lie open to this confusion of ideas and will need the warning that those who attack the perversions of Science are not attacking Science itself, but defending it."

"I have wandered all my life, and I have also traveled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment."

"I sincerely hope, trust, and pray that this part of my journey will not seem as dull to you as it did to me at the time, or as it does to me now while I write of it. But now I come to think of it, it cannot seem as dull, for I had to walk that wretched thirty miles or so all the day long, whereas you have not even to read it; for I am not going to say anything more about it, but lead you straight to the end. Oh, blessed quality of books, that makes them a refuge from living! For in a book everything can be made to fit in, all tedium can be skipped over, and the intense moments can be made timeless and eternal."

"I said to Heart, "How goes it?" Heart replied: "Right as a Ribstone Pippin!" But it lied."

"If antiquity be the only test of nobility, then cheese is a very noble thing.... The lineage of cheese is demonstrably beyond all record."

"If any man gives you a wine you can't bear, don't say it is beastly.... But don't say you like it. You are endangering your soul and the use of wine as well... Seek out some other wine good to your taste."

"I'm tired of Love; I'm still more tired of Rhyme. But money gives me pleasure all the time."

"If you can describe clearly without a diagram the proper way of making this or that knot, then you are a master of the English language."

"If we are to be happy, decent and secure of our souls: drink some kind of fermented liquor with one's food; go on the water from time to time; dance on occasions, and sing in a chorus..."

"In Science, physical, documentary, or of any other kind, there cannot be inherently a false philosophy, for truth does not contradict truth. Mankind has been at Science since men have been men, and within their limited range the animals are practicing science all day long. A bird which gives up at last the attempt to fly through a glass window has arrived through experiment and conclusion at the fact that the glass is not penetrable by him and ceases to entertain the idea of the opposite. The burnt child who dreads the fire has done a little work in Science, so has the whole human race in its tremendous achievement of our original civilization, which is incomparably greater, in extent as well as in quality, than the added results of the last few generations. Whoever first cooked meat, or first framed something like a plow, or first carved an image, was doing a bit of scientific work: discovering and establishing fact by experiment and applying that fact to the uses of mankind. There was not and could not be anything of perversion or falsity attached to so necessary, permanent, original and enduring a human process, any more than there could be to breathing or to sleeping."

"In the form of security and sufficiency for the men who labor to the profit of others, and in the form of registering and controlling them in the form of an organized public supervision of their labor, slavery is already afoot. When slavery shall succeed it will succeed through the acquiescence of those who will be enslaved, for they will prefer sufficiency and security with enslavement, to freedom, responsibility, insecurity and the threat of insufficiency."

"If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course."

"In the midst of all these innumerable forms of a common protest and universal ill-ease there has grown up one definite body of doctrine whose adherents are called Communists and who desired the total subversion of what had been, hitherto unquestioned among civilized European men, the general doctrines of property and individual freedom."

"In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this that he cannot make; that he can befog or destroy, but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true. We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile."

"In soft deluding lies let fools delight. A shadow marks our days, which end in Night."

"In the perfect Capitalist State there would be no food available for the non-owner save when he was actually engaged in Production, and that absurdity would, by quickly ending all human lives save those of the owners, put a term to the arrangement."

"In the same way the eminence attaching to the mere possession of great wealth disappoints us nine times out of ten, especially if the wealth has been accumulated rapidly. For great wealth is accumulated rapidly by cunning or chance, or a mixture of the two. Cunning has nothing to do with high qualities; it is rather a presumption against them; while chance has nothing to do with them either. Therefore it is that men are always complaining after meeting So-and-so, that he seemed to be astonishingly stupid, though he made a million in ten years and started as a pauper."

"Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone."

"It has unfortunately now become a habit for so many generations, that it has almost passed into an instinct throughout the Jewish body, to rely upon the weapon of secrecy. Secret societies, a language kept as far as possible secret, the use of false names in order to hide secret movements, secret relations between various parts of the Jewish body: all these and other forms of secrecy have become the national method."

"It has been discovered that with a dull urban population, all formed under a mechanical system of State education, a suggestion or command, however senseless and unreasoned, will be obeyed if it be sufficiently repeated."

"It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation."

"It is the best of all trades, to make songs, and the second best to sing them."

"It is therefore our business to restore economic freedom through the restoration of the only institution under which it flourishes, which institution is Property. The problem before us is, how to restore Property so that it shall be, as it was not so long ago, a general institution."

"It is this worth, that is, this ability to get other wealth in exchange, which constitutes true Economic Wealth."

"It has long been recognized by public men of all kinds. . . that statistics come under the head of lying, and that no lie is so false or inconclusive as that which is based on statistics."

"It is further an admitted historical truth, which no one denies, that such an institution putting forth such a claim has been present among mankind for many centuries. Many through antagonism or lack of knowledge deny the identity of the Catholic Church today with the original Christian society."

"It is a consolation to remember that corruption pushed beyond a certain point provides its own remedy, and that this sort of thing cannot indefinitely continue; but it is less consoling to remember another truth, to wit, that the correction of political and social evil may come in the form of irremediable catastrophe, and that the innocent, who are the greater number, would then suffer most. It is still less consoling to remember the universal human experience that when evil is redressed by the only partly conscious force of reaction, it is not succeeded by a corresponding good, but by some other new and unexpected evil."

"It is in the irony of Providence that the more man comes to control the material world about him, the more does he lose control over the effects of his action; and it is when he is remaking the world most speedily that he knows least whither he is driving."

"It is Mind which determines the change of Society, and it was because the mind at work was a Catholic mind that the slave became a serf and was on his way to becoming a peasant and a fully free man-a man free economically as well as politically. The whole spirit of the Church was for small property, and that spirit was slowly, instinctively, working for the establishment of small property throughout Christendom."

"It is not insignificant that the Church, in the rare places and times when she had power to do so, did not compel the mind. During all that intense intellectual life of the thirteenth century instruction was by choice: endowed?so that the poorest could reach the highest inspiration, but at the choice of the individual or family will, to be taken or left."