When somebody wishes to wage a social war against what all normal people have regarded as a social decency, the very first thing he does is to find some artificial term that shall sound relatively decent.

-June 30, 1928, Illustrated London News
[quoted in Gilbert, September/October 2026]

When the first giraffe was described by travellers it was treated as a lie. Now it is in the Zoological Gardens; but it still looks like a lie.

October 28,1911, Illustrated London News

Our great calamity to-day is the failure of words to bind...Everybody picks up a word when it helps him, and throws it away when it hinders him, without worrying about its truth or meaning...We shall not advance an inch in any of the arguments of to-day till people can be induced to see that a word can only be used as a spell, or even as a curse, so long as we keep it sacred.

-February 15, 1913, Illustrated London News

We are constantly reminded, especially by those stunted sceptics who seem never to get beyond one step in thought, that many of the popular customs of Christmas are pagan things. In one sense it is true, though in the sense they mean it is untrue. Most of us were pagans before we were christened; but that does not necessarily make us pagans now. And this is quite as true of an institution as of an individual.

-December 24, 1921, Illustrated London News

It seems nowadays to be counted a prodigy that the truisms can come true. The discovery that a new notion is nonsense is itself treated as a new notion. There is a tradition, let us say, that jumping off a high precipice is prejudicial to the health; and therefore nobody does it. Then appears a progressive prophet and reformer, who points out that we really know nothing about it, because nobody does it. He urges, truly, that you and I have but rarely tested the matter by ourselves falling off high cliffs and carefully noting the results. He insists that there is seldom a long queue, or continuous procession of persons, filing past Dover up to Shakespeare's Cliff with this scientific object; and that there is, therefore, no sufficient number of cases of the needs of induction. At last some highly scientific character does jump off Shakespeare's Cliff, and is found dead on Dover sands. And the other scientists, standing round his corpse in a ring, do not regard it as the remains of a fool or a hero or an example of the ancient human tragedy. They regard it as if it were some entirely new and interesting sea-beast thrown up by the sea. They have made a discovery. They hardly realise that it is merely the discovery that all their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers were right. But they are bound to admit it is the discovery that they themselves were wrong. And that is a very astonishing discovery indeed.

-March 9, 1918, Illustrated London News

Satan rebuking sin is a mild figure of speech for the enormous notion of a politician denouncing deceptions.

-December 22, 1906, Illustrated London News

[Modern] social reform is something much worse than giving all wealth to the Government. It is rather giving all government to the wealthy. It is arming plutocracy with bureaucracy.

-March 1,1919, Illustrated London News

The great strength of Christian sanctity has always been simply this - that the worst enemies of the saints could not say of the saints anything worse than they said of themselves. It is disheartening to go on abusing a man while he is quite unconscious of your presence, but is in a low and furious undertone abusing himself. This has always been the strong point of even the most commonplace Christianity. Suppose the village Atheist had a sudden and splendid impulse to rush into the village church and denounce everybody there as miserable offenders. It was always quite possible that he might break in at the exact moment when they were saying the same thing themselves. You can say anything against a man who praises himself, but a man who blames himself is invulnerable.

-October 12, 1907, Illustrated London News

...And the whole object of real art, of real romance - and, above all, of real religion - is to prevent people from losing the humility and gratitude which are thankful for daylight and daily bread; to prevent them from regarding daily life as dull or domestic life as narrow; to teach them to feel in the sunlight the song of Apollo and in the bread the epic of the plough. What is now needed most is intensive imagination. I mean the power to turn our imaginations inwards, on the things we already have, and to make those things live. It is not merely seeking new experiences, which rapidly become old experiences. It is really learning how to experience our experiences. It is learning how to enjoy our enjoyments. As it is, we are surrounded by a riot which is excused as the only way of being young, but which seems really to be a rapid way of growing old.

-September 20, 1924, Illustrated London News

...the only truly traditional tradition is one that is still a living thing.

-August 30, 1924, Illustrated London News

As a matter of fact, of course, all education is religious education- and never more than when it is irreligious education. It either teaches a definite doctrine about the universe, which is theology; or else it takes one for granted, which is mysticism. If it does not do that it does nothing at all, and means nothing at all, for everything must depend on first principles and refer to some causes, expressed or unexpressed.

-July 26, 1924, Illustrated London News

[I]magination is the signal of instinct. Journalism only tells us what men are doing; it is fiction that tells us what they are thinking, and still more what they are feeling...[A]ll fiction is only a diary of day-dreams instead of days. And this profound occupation of men's minds with certain things always eventually has an effect even on the external expression of the age. 

-April 21, 1923, Illustrated London News

Every kind of bureaucratic busybody has swarmed round the poor man's house until his whole authority in it has been hollowed out and eaten away. Children cannot treat parents as authorities whom authorities treat as slaves. The consequence is that nearly the whole normal business of looking after children has passed from the parent to the policeman.

-March 24 1923, Illustrated London News

Just as it was the mark of old tyranny to stretch the law, so it will be the mark of new tyranny to make a law that can be stretched. To a great extent, at least, what used to be called common law used the language of common-sense. That is, it used words that were a little too popular to be entirely twisted out of their ordinary sense. Stealing could hardly be stretched to mean taking ten minutes of a man's time. Murder could hardly be made to include any sort of material inconvenience, that anybody might say had shortened his life. But if the law begins to deal with new scientific words, that do not as yet correspond to any popular and recognised things, we have no public protection against their being extended to touch anything or anybody.

-March 17, 1923, Illustrated London News

It is a curious irony that [...] a modern man thinks that people in the Middle Ages believed anything they were told. For in truth he only thinks it because he himself believes anything he is told about the Middle Ages. It is modern credulity that has invented mediaeval credulity.

-November 18, 1922, Illustrated London News

[Mr. Edison] then goes on to deal with the origin of life; or rather, not to deal with it. The following statement is of such fearful intensity and importance that the interviewer prints it all in italics, and I will so reproduce it. "I believe the form of energy that we call life came to the earth from some other planet or at any rate from somewhere out in the great spaces beyond us." In short, there will henceforth be branded upon our brains the conviction that life came from somewhere, and probably under some conditions of space. But the suggestion that it came from another planet seems a rather weak evasion. Even a mind enfeebled by popular science would be capable of stirring faintly at that, and feeling unsatisfied. If it came from another planet, how did it arise on that planet? And in whatever way it arose on that planet, why could it not arise in that way on this planet? We are dealing with something admittedly unique and mysterious: like a ghost. The original rising of life from the lifeless is as strange as a rising from the dead. But this is like explaining a ghost walking visibly in the churchyard, by saying that it must have come from the churchyard of another village.

-May 3, 1924, Illustrated London News

[B]ecause our expression is imperfect we need friendship to fill up the imperfections.

-June 6, 1931, Illustrated London News

[H/T Society of G.K. Chesterton]

Illustrated London News, January 14, 1911 

[A] ritual is almost the opposite of a routine [...] The essence of real ritual is that a man does something because it signifies something; it may be stiff or slow or ceremonial in form; that depends on the nature of the artistic form that is used. But he does it because it is significant. It is the essence of routine that he does it because it is insignificant.

December 21, 1935 Illustrated London News

[M]ost fundamental falsehoods are errors in language as well as in philosophy. Most statements that are unreasonable are really ungrammatical.

-October 16, 1909, Illustrated London News