[D]emocracy tends too much to mean politicians[.]

-April 22.1911, Daily News

As it is, I look on that most glorious of sights: a collision. You may call it, if you like, an overlapping: the spring has begun before the winter has left off [...] The essential is that this entanglement of advancing spring with retreating winter has all the crashing qualities of a battle. I look out on my garden and see time sharpened and shortened, and all things become contemporary. I see the snow shooting downwards with arrows at the flowers; and the flowers fighting upwards with shields and spears against the snow. And I see the double paradox of the seasons: the comfortable colours of snow side by side with all the airiness and eagerness of the early plants. I see all the warmth of the winter and the coldness of the spring.

-Lunacy and Letters (1958)

[I]f we are to keep any kind of public control on our destiny, we must insist on having violent things called by their own violent names.

-May 18, 1912, Daily News

[S]elf-criticism [is] the necessary condition of all criticism.

-The New Jerusalem (1920)

The worst is always very near the best; there is something much worse than atheism which is Satanism; otherwise known as Being God.

-The Poet and the Lunatics (1929)

[Real democracy] means all the people; even that disgusting part with which we do not agree [...] And the contrast between the real democracy and the little democratic cliques is sometimes very startling. At present, indeed, to ask a 'democrat' really to accept democracy is generally like asking a vegetarian to eat an oak tree.

-December 31, 1910, Daily News

For it is often necessary to walk backwards, as a man on the wrong road goes back to a sign-post to find the right road. The modern man is more like a traveller who has forgotten the name of his destination, and has to go back whence he came, even to find out where he is going.

-The New Jerusalem (1920)

Disagree with Socialists if you like. Disagree with Anarchists if you like. Both habits, if exercised in moderation, are good for the health. But do not lose your temper, for this is always fatal to the generous and humane institution which we call argument.

-February 21, 1914, Illustrated London News

There may have been a time when people found it easy to believe anything. But we are finding it vastly easier to disbelieve anything. Both processes save the human mind from the disgusting duty of distinguishing between one thing and another. There may have been, though I never came across them in life or literature, some kind of clodhoppers who believed that every legend was true. But we shall be a much stupider kind of clodhoppers if we believe that every legend is legendary. In either case the effort which human laziness resists is that of drawing a distinction [...] the bother is that one has to use one's brains.

-March 14, 1914, Illustrated London News

The modern Puritan is never so bitter as when he is making concessions. The modern bishop is never so illiberal as when he is liberal-minded. For both have the sense of being ashamed of the best thing that they possess.

-June 9, 1906, Daily News

A modern Parliamentarian is not chosen by the people, even when he elected by the people [...] He is elected at the best as the better of two evils. It is a plutocratic organisation that chooses the choice of evils. It is a plutocratic process, above all, because nobody can afford an election except a rich man, or the nominee of a rich man [...] This is not democracy any more than it is aristocracy [.]

-May 20, 1922, Illustrated London News

"There is far too quick a step from minority to unanimity."

Indeed, there is rather too much in our modern society of this sudden conversion- this abrupt collapse. There is far too quick a step from minority to unanimity. There is far too little of that slow and stubborn persuasion which means hard thinking and hard fighting. When two drops of rain on a window-pane happen to come together they run down the glass like a river; similarly, when a few influences meet in the modern world they seem to sweep the country.

-May 25, 1907, Illustrated London News