One of the great disadvantages of hurry is that it takes such a long time.
The historian has a habit of saying of people in the past: 'I think they may well be considered worthy of praise, allowing for the ideas of their times.' There will never be really good history until the historian says, ‘I think they were worthy of praise, allowing for the ideas of my time.
England and the English governing class never did call on this absurd deity of race until it seemed, for an instant, that they had no other god to call on… the truth of the whole matter is very simple. Nationality exists, and has nothing in the world to do with race. Nationality is a thing like a church or a secret society. It is the product of the human soul and will; it is a spiritual product. And there are men… who would think anything and do anything rather than admit anything could be a spiritual product.
This man's spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.
Can it cure the one spiritual disease?” asked Father Brown, with a serious curiosity. “And what is the one spiritual disease?” asked Flambeau, smiling. “Oh, thinking one is quite well,” said his friend.
It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.
All we know of the Missing Link is that he is missing - and he won't be missed either.
The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statues, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen—that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the government will really help it to persecute its heretics…I am not frightened of the word ‘persecution’…It is a term of legal fact. If it means the imposition by the police of a widely disputed theory, incapable of final proof—then our priests are not now persecuting, but our doctors are.
Culture, like science, is no protection against demons.
While most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.
Satire may be mad and anarchic, but it presupposes an admitted superiority in certain things over others; it presupposes a standard.
The truths of religion are unprovable; the facts of science are unproved.
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read.
The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.
There are books showing men how to succeed in everything; they are written by men who cannot even succeed in writing books.
I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.
Without education, we are in a horrible and deadly danger of taking educated people seriously.
No man who worships education has got the best out of education... Without a gentle contempt for education no man's education is complete.
That is the one eternal education: to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.
As regards moral courage, then, it is not so much that the public schools support it feebly, as that they suppress it firmly.
