"...to be modern is to idolatrise one century out of many."

Free-thinking (or re-thinking, which is a better word for it) is not, then, a thing which every man should do everywhere. But when a man does do it, it should be thorough and sweeping and searching. It should not be content with doubting a few old doctrines which a man has heard doubted; it should doubt the things that have never been doubted, or it is useless. A man should question his unconscious convictions, as well as his conscious ones. For a man is conscious of the past, but unconscious of the present [....]

[...] He must, in a word, not be modern; for to be modern is to idolatrise one century out of many. He must be outside centuries, living by the immortal mind.

This is the grand and noble and invaluable thing called Free Thought, of which no praise can conceivably be excessive. But it happens that it is the fact, accidental enough perhaps, that of all the free-thinkers I have known, very few indeed have done anything of this sort, or shown any disposition to do so: most of them are imprisoned in their hats. And those that have done so have in number of cases become...but I will not be controversial.

-September 30, 1905, Daily News

In a popular magazine there is one of the usual articles about criminology; about whether wicked men could be made good if their heads were taken to pieces. As by far the wickedest men I know of are much too rich and powerful ever to submit to the process, the speculation leaves me cold. I always notice with pain, however, a curious absence of the portraits of living millionaires from such galleries of awful examples; most of the portraits in which we are called upon to remark the line of the nose or the curve of the forehead appear to be the portraits of ordinary sane men, who stole because they were hungry or killed because they were in a rage. The physical peculiarity seems to vary infinitely; sometimes it is the remarkable square head, sometimes it is the unmistakable round head; sometimes the learned draw attention to the abnormal development, sometimes to the striking deficiency of the back of the head. I have tried to discover what is the invariable factor, the one permanent mark of the scientific criminal type; after exhaustive classification I have come to the conclusion that it consists in being poor.

-Alarms and Discursions (1910)

"the Family....now never mentioned in respectable circles."

[...] my own remedies [...] would involve indecent allusions to a [...] thing called the Family; now never mentioned in respectable circles.

-All I Survey (1933)

[...] the most ignorant of humanity know by the very look of earth that they have forgotten heaven.

-The Everlasting Man (1925)

[...] every "reform" to-day is a treaty between the two most influential modern figures- the great capitalist and the small faddist.

-Fancies Versus Fads (1923)

The true religion is not that which has no difficulties. It is that which has difficulties where common sense has difficulties. We have to swallow mysteries with it. But we have to swallow the same mysteries without it.

-November 28, 1903, Daily News

A politician with a future means a politician with a forgotten past.

-January 28, 1920, New Witness

"...the frightful punishment of mere sex emancipation....is not anarchy but bureaucracy."

[...] supposing that the extreme anarchist school could prevail in a sort of universal riot of promiscuity, the result could only be that the whole new generation of humanity would be thrown on the resources of the only thing which could be considered responsible for them [...] the frightful punishment of mere sex emancipation [...] is not anarchy but bureaucracy [...] The total control of human life will pass to the state; and it will be a very Totalitarian State.

January 4, 1936, Illustrated London News

The modern industrial world is not in the least democratic; but it is supposed to be democratic, or supposed to be trying to be democratic. The ninth century, the time of the Norse invasions, was not saintly in the sense of being filled with saints; it was filled with pirates and petty tyrants, and the first feudal anarchy. But sanctity was the only ideal those barbarians had, when they had any at all. And democracy is the only ideal the industrial millions have, when they have any at all. Sanctity was the light of the Dark Ages, or if you will the dream of the Dark Ages. And democracy is the dream of the dark age of industrialism; if it be very much of a dream. It is this which prophets promise to achieve, and politicians pretend to achieve, and poets sometimes desire to achieve, and sometimes only desire to desire. In a word, an equal citizenship is quite the reverse of the reality in the modern world; but it is still the ideal in the modern world. At any rate it has no other ideal. If the figure that has alighted on the column in the Place de la Bastille be indeed the spirit of liberty, it must see a million growths in a modern city to make it wish to fly back again into heaven. But our secular society would not know what goddess to put on the pillar in its place.

-The New Jerusalem (1920)

Play

Of this childish monopoly of things purely human there are many examples. But certainly the most remarkable example is the institution called "play." There is nothing in the slightest degree childish, as the word is ordinarily understood, about the institution of play. It differs from all the other arts only in being more serious and direct; it differs from all the other games only in being more varied and poetical. When a grown-up person has an artistic idea he or she scrawls it down in a set of ugly hieroglyphics on a piece of paper and gives it to somebody else to take care of and turn into other and uglier hieroglyphics; or else he takes a stick of burnt wood or a mess of coloured pastes and plasters on to a piece of canvas a laborious and inadequate picture of what he means. A child simply thinks of the idea and performs it. If he thinks of a fight with swords, for example, he does not write and re-write and correct a piece of artificial prose about “ringing parries” and “dazzling thrusts in carte.” He does not mix three kinds of white and four kinds of blue in order to imitate the gleam of sunlight on steel. He simply fights with swords. My present contention is not merely that this conduct of the child is more picturesque, more amusing, more poetical, for of this almost all modern writers are fully aware. My contention at present is that it is much more human, much more sensible, much more sane. The conduct of a child who, the moment he thinks of a man in a hat and cloak, puts on a hat and cloak, appears to me preferable to the conduct of the adult artist simply because it is so much more reasonable. If, as one of us walks down the street, it suddenly strikes him how magnificent it would be to lunge and guard with his umbrella like a sword, why should he not lunge and guard with his umbrella? It is a much more serious and creditable proceeding than reading up irrelevant fact in the British Museum in order to write an ephemeral story about someone else lunging and guarding.

-November 16, 1901, The Speaker

Education

While the modern public, with a kind of crude courage and good-will, build schools and more schools, and yet more schools, votes grants, and more grants, and yet more grants, serves our education to everyone everywhere as if education were something as plain and homogeneous as so much cheese, inquirers of the type of Miss [Charlotte] Mason are studying the first principles of education on which the good or ill of all this action rests with a care that may be called laboriousness and a calm that might almost be called scepticism. The contrast between the two spirits is odd and a little disquieting. The slow and deliberate theories are embodied in educational articles. The hasty and fleeting theories are embodied in enormous buildings of brick and stone. The more tested and less doubtful doctrines are printed in books which scarcely anybody reads. The less tested and doubtful theories are embodied in Acts of Parliament that everybody has to obey. Nothing can breed more strange doubts in the mind than the contemplation of so much responsibility in private and so much frivolity in public. We hear little but derision directed towards the old fathers and heresiarchs, who tore theories to shreds before they would proceed to the smallest practical reform, but if there be little doubt that they erred on one side I fancy there is even less doubt that we err on the other. No doubt it is a very legitimate and beautiful object to proceed rapidly from theory to execution; but to rush at the execution and then go on to the theory is not legitimate or beautiful; but it is the indwelling principle of modern politics and modern education. It is very fine to aim at having a thing established a week after it has been discovered to be good. But the aim of many advanced persons to-day is to have a thing established a week before it is discovered to be bad.

-May 13, 1905, Daily News

The whole of the modern attack upon marriage and the family is in its inmost nature plutocratic.

-A Handful of Authors (1953)