[..] there plunged in all the people who think they can solve a problem they cannot understand by abolishing everything that has contributed to it. We all know these people. If a barber has cut his customer's throat because the girl has changed her partner for a dance or donkey ride on Hampstead Heath, there are always people to protest against the mere institutions that led up to it. This would not have happened if barbers were abolished, or if cutlery were abolished, or if the objection felt by girls to imperfectly grown beards were abolished, or if the girls were abolished, or if heaths and open spaces were abolished, or if dancing were abolished, or if donkeys were abolished. But donkeys, I fear, will never be abolished.

-The Flying Inn (1914)

It is a great pity that our headlong and hurried Press is always half a century behind the times. The reason is in no way recondite; it is behind the times because it is hurried and headlong. That which is forced to be rapid is specially likely to be trite [...] Upon this very simple fact of human nature- that bustle always means banality- the whole gigantic modern Press, the palladum of our liberties, is built. Leader-writers write the flattest Liberalism or Toryism to feed the impatient printing-machines, just as private persons scribble their dullest and most conventional notes to catch the post. But the principle extents to the theories as well as the expression of them.

-March 26, 1910, Illustrated London News

It is difficult in these days to escape from the topic of politics even by deliberately talking about something else. For there are a considerable number of people who will at once attribute any disaster, from the weather to the Brighton railway smash, to the particular politicians whom they dislike.

-February 19, 1910, Illustrated London News

Marriage is not a mere chain upon love as the anarchists say; nor is it a mere crown upon love as the sentimentalists say. Marriage is a fact, an actual human relation like that of motherhood which has certain human habits and loyalties, except in a few monstrous cases where it is turned to torture by special insanity and sin. A marriage is neither an ecstasy nor a slavery; it is a commonwealth; it is a separate working and fighting thing like a nation. Kings and diplomatists talk of “forming alliances” when they make weddings; but indeed every wedding is primarily an alliance. The family is a fact even when it is not an agreeable fact, and a man is part of his wife even when he wishes he wasn’t. The twain are one flesh — yes, even when they are not one spirit. Man is duplex. Man is a quadruped.

-George Bernard Shaw (1909)

THE ALMIGHTY STICK
"Daily News", October 23, 1909

We do not need the learned man to teach us the important things.  We all know the important things, though we all violate and neglect them.  Gigantic industry, abysmal knowledge, are needed for the discovery of the tiny things — the things that seem hardly worth the trouble.  Generally speaking, the ordinary man should be content with the terrible secret that men are men — which is another way of saying that they are brothers.

-The Uses of Diversity (1921)

A perfect description of most political debates these days...

There is one little habit of some of the most intelligent modern writers against which I should like to protest. It consists of flatly refusing to state somebody else's opinion as it stands; and consider it on its own merits. The modern writer must always assume that it is a choice between his own extreme opinion and something at the other extreme.

-The Common Man (1950)

Billy prepares sermons and speeches with exceptional thoroughness. A voracious reader, especially of biography, history, and current affairs, he cultivated a nearly photographic memory for the printed word and could assimilate a page swiftly, whether newspaper (subscriber to many) or book. Ruth extends his range, being an even more dedicated bookworm, distilling for him her browsing in C.S. Lewis, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Blaise Pascal, G.K. Chesterton, George MacDonald, and much more:poetry, literature, Bible studies, and other areas.

-The Billy Graham Story, Revd. Dr John Charles Pollock (2011)

"...he may be said to have heckled himself for hundreds of pages.".

Now the Schoolman always had two ideas in his head; if they were only the Yes and No of his own proposition. The Schoolman was not only the schoolmaster but also the schoolboy; he examined himself; he cross-examined himself; he may be said to have heckled himself for hundreds of pages. Nobody can read St. Thomas's theology without hearing all the arguments against St. Thomas's theology. Therefore, even when that sort of faith produced what many would call ferocity, it always produced what I mean here by fairness; the almost involuntary intellectual fairness of one who cannot help knowing that the universe is a many-sided thing. That is precisely the temper of Chaucer; and that is what I mean when I say that he got his broad-mindedness from his theology; though it was not what is now generally meant by a broad theology. The essential point is that it was not a simple theology.

-Chaucer (1932)

What had happened to the human imagination, as a whole, was that the whole world was coloured by dangerous and rapidly deteriorating passions; by natural passions becoming unnatural passions. Thus the effect of treating sex as only one innocent natural thing was that every other innocent natural thing became soaked and sodden with sex. For sex cannot be admitted to a mere equality among elementary emotions or experiences like eating and sleeping. The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant. There is something dangerous and disproportionate in its place in human nature, for whatever reason; and it does really need a special purification and dedication. The modern talk about sex being free like any other sense, about the body being beautiful like any tree or flower, is either a description of the Garden of Eden or a piece of thoroughly bad psychology, of which the world grew weary two thousand years ago.

-St. Francis of Assissi (1923)

Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.

-The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)

In all these pictures and painted medieval Bibles or missals there are traces of many fancies and fashions, but there is not even the trace of a trace of this one modern heresy of artistic monotone. There is not the trace of a trace of this idea of the keeping of comedy out of tragedy. The moderns who disbelieve in Christianity treat it much more reverently than these Christians who did believe in Christianity. The wildest joke in Voltaire is not wilder than some of the jokes coloured here by men, meek and humble, in their creed.

To mention one thing out of a thousand, take this. I have seen a picture in which the seven-headed beast of the Apocalypse was included among the animals in Noah's Ark, and duly provided with a seven-headed wife to assist him in propagating that important race to be in time for the Apocalypse. If Voltaire had thought of that, he would certainly have said it. But the restrictions of these men were restrictions of external discipline: they were not like ours, restrictions of mood. It might be a question how far people should be allowed to make jokes about Christianity; but there was no doubt that they should be allowed to feel jokes about it. There was no question of that merely impressional theory that we should look through only one peep-hole at a time. Their souls were at least stereoscopic. They had nothing to do with that pictorial impressionism which means closing one eye. They had nothing to do with that philosophical impressionism which means being half-witted.

-Lunacy and Letters (1958)