The vote is only a cheque that is sure to be dishonoured.

-May 15, 1913, New Witness

What a cat really wants is a riddle as ancient as what the Sphinx really means.

-November 21, 1912, New Witness

It is always hard to make a rule about the claim of the amateur to contradict the expert. One test, which would by itself cart away a great deal of lumber, is the rule that none is a specialist outside his speciality. In magazines and such modern arenas this truism is often oddly disregarded [...] But there is yet another line along which the conclusions of the expert may lawfully be tested by the amateur. And these are the cases in which the expert actually asserts what the amateur is able from his own knowledge to deny. We are not bound to believe the Astronomer Royal when he disproves the sun in heaven; and though I may respect my doctor when he tells me I am dying, I shall differ from him if he tells me I am dead.

-March 2,1916, New Witness

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

-January 28, 1920, New Witness

I think the errors arising from incautious speech are far less dangerous just now than the much larger errors arising from systematic suppression.

-March 24, 1922, New Witness

[H/T ACS]

"...the best blasphemy is in the Bible."

[Chesterton commenting on the part of the book of Job in which Job curses the day he was born]

The Book of Job is certainly among "the best that has been written"," etc., and there is something compact and contained in the thought that the best blasphemy is in the Bible [...] Now what can we really pit against a poem like that of Job to express a saner statement about a man's birthday? [...] The best answer to it is not any individual composition; it is a universal custom. It is the simple fact that men do keep birthdays and keep them as feast-days. The answer is in all the birthdays of men and even in the celestial paradox of the birthday of God. Christmas Day is the real answer to the Book of Job. The nativity even of a true Man of Sorrows is itself a day of joys, and even of jokes [..] It is perhaps a less sublime literary achievement to say "Many happy returns of the day" than "May the day perish wherein I was born." But the whole point of it is that, apart from the many happy returns of the day, there will certainly be many happy returns of the remark. The birthday is a dogma no normal men deny, a formula of fundamental confession; and it thanks Heaven by implication for our creation, preservation and all the blessings of this life [...] If men really thought a baby unlucky for being born, they would have behaved otherwise from the beginning; they would have black-edged cards instead of birthday cards, black bread instead of birthday cake, readings from Schopenhauer instead of Birthday Odes or the more delicate of a man's friends might avoid alluding to his father's son having been born, as they would to his father having been hanged.

-July 5, 1917, The New Witness, "The Pessimist and the Birthday Book"
Found in Brave New Family, ed. Alvaro de Silva (1990)