The healthy doctrine of liberty, for which we are supposed to stand, is not really perplexing to the mind, though, like many other good things, it is partly a paradox. The two parts of the doctrine are these: first, that there are some things in which a man ought to be interfered with by force, and some things in which he ought emphatically to be left alone; and second, that the things he is permitted to do must often be worse than the things he is forbidden to do. A lady's sneer in a smoking carriage may be much more offensive than a gentleman's cigar in a non-smoking carriage. But the collective strength of mankind is capable of taking the cigar out of the gentleman's mouth. Whereas nothing short of racks and red-hot pincers and the most fiendish torment could take the sneer out of the mouth of the lady. The things are different in kind; and to remember that is to keep the civilized instinct of liberty. The man's cigar is incendiary; like a firebrand or a blazing bomb. The man's cigar is a kind of physical assault; and suppressing it is only preserving social order. The lady's smile is a department of devil-worship; and respecting it is religious toleration.

-Februay 12, 1910, Daily News

"The Pattern of Myth" (Jon Snow)

https://www.theodysseyonline.com/the-pattern-of-myth

It may or may not do good to go to a hall packed with one's own sort of people and hit a table and say that the will of the people must prevail. It will certainly do unmixed harm if by the “people” we mean the people in the hall and not the people in the street.

January 11, 1913, Daily News

[H/T ACS Facebook page]

Even if we are to deal first with a League of Nations, we presumably have to deal with the Nations as well as the League. The principle of "the self-determination of all peoples" must obviously mean permitting every people to settle its own affairs- and not settling every people's affairs for it.

-February 15, 1919, Illustrated London News

"...that warmer and more domestic thing, a house on fire."

Since, like I said a few days ago, I recently read a work of Charlotte Bronte, I decide to re-read some references to her in GKC, and came across this wonderful description of her (also found in his book The Victorian Age in Literature, right after the passage which I quoted the other day.)

But while Emily Brontë was as unsociable as a storm at midnight [...] Charlotte Brontë was [...] like that warmer and more domestic thing, a house on fire [...]

"Yielding to a temptation is like yielding to a blackmailer; you pay to be free, and find yourself the more enslaved."

The evil of vindictiveness is the same as that of every other sin; it is that in some extraordinary way it tends to destroy the soul, to blacken and eat up the whole nature [...] Yielding to a temptation is like yielding to a blackmailer; you pay to be free, and find yourself the more enslaved. The reality of sin arises, in fact, from the same truth which makes the reality of human poetry and joy. It arises from the fact that the smallest thing in this world has its own infinity [...]

[...] That is the whole point of the position of sin in human psychology, and that is the whole point of the peril of revenge. Hatred is bad [...] because it narrows the soul to a sharp point. It is not merely that Jones desires the death of Brown [...] The evil is that the death of Brown becomes the whole life of Jones. The violent man, in short, tries to break out; but he only succeeds in breaking in. He breaks into smaller and smaller cells of his own subterranean heart till he is suffocated in the smallest, and dies like a rat in a hole.

-August 8, 1908, Daily News

"Jane Eyre remains the best of [Charlotte Bronte's] books [...] because while it is a human document written in blood, it is also one of the best blood-and-thunder detective stories in the world.

 In any case, it is Charlotte Brontë who enters Victorian literature. The shortest way  of stating her strong contribution is, I think, this: that she reached the highest romance through the lowest realism. She did not set out with Amadis of Gaul in a forest or with Mr. Pickwick in a comic club. She set out with herself, with her own dingy clothes, and accidental ugliness, and flat, coarse, provincial household; and forcibly fused all such muddy materials into a spirited fairy-tale. If the first chapters on the home and school had not proved how heavy and hateful sanity can be, there would really be less point in the insanity of Mr. Rochester's wife—or the not much milder insanity of Mrs. Rochester's husband. She discovered the secret of hiding the sensational in the commonplace: and Jane Eyre remains the best of her books (better even than Villette) because while it is a human document written in blood, it is also one of the best blood-and-thunder detective stories in the world.

-The Victorian Age in Literature (1913)

[I ended up reading the novel this week based on this quote by GKC, and I agree]