"What a huge inaccessible lumber-room of thought and experience we amounted to, I thought; how much we are, how little we transmit."

"Look at the way people have swung through Communism, Toryism, Liberalism -- in vast blocks. In my father's boyhood you were either a Liberal or a Conservative in England, and there you stuck, and in America you were a sturdy individualist Democrat or Republican from the cradle to the grave. But now the Voice does it -- the pervading voice. And just nowit's come to a point when a Voice -- putting it straight and clear. Straight and clear..."

"In times of long established peace, when the tradition of generations has established the illusion of the profoundest human security, men's minds are not greatly distressed by grotesqueness and absurdity in their political forms. It is all part of the humour and the good-humour of life. When one believes that all the tigers in the jungle are dead, it is quite amusing to walk along the jungle paths in a dressing-gown with a fan instead of a gun."

"Leaders should lead as far as they can and then vanish. Their ashes should not choke the fire they have lit."

"If after all my Atheology turns out wrong and your Theology right I feel I shall always be able to pass into Heaven (if I want to) as a friend of G.K.C.'s. Bless you."

"Why are these things permitted? What sins have we done? The morning service was over, I was walking through the roads to clear my brain for the afternoon, and then-fire, earthquake, death! As if it were Sodom and Gomorrah! All our work undone, all the work- What are these Martians? What are we? I answered, clearing my throat."

"You English," said Steenhold."You Americans," said Rud."When you aren't as fresh as paint," he said, "you Americans are as stale as old cabbage leaves. I'm amazed at your Labour leaders, at the sort of things you can still take seriously as Presidential Candidates. These leonine reverberators tossing their manes back in order to keep their eyes on the White House -- they belong to the Pleistocene. We dropped that sort of head in England after John Bright. When the Revolution is over and I retire, I shall retire as Hitler did, to some remote hunting-lodge, and we'll have the heads of Great Labour Leaders and Presidential Hopes stuck all round the Hall. Hippopotami won't be in it."

"But nowadays -- Our weakness for the last few years has been the ineffectiveness of the Opposition. This Labour Party has never had the quality of a fighting Opposition. It has just sucked the life out of Radicalism. It has never had the definite idealism of the Whigs and Liberals. 'Give us more employment and slightly higher pay and be sure of our contentment,' says Labour. 'We're loyal. We know our place. But we don't like being unemployed.' What good is that as Opposition? It's about as much opposition as a mewing cat. We mean more than that. I tell you frankly. Our task, I take it, my task, is to reinstate that practical working Opposition which has always been Old England's alternative line of defence... For the good of all of us..."

"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race."

"We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries."

"There's truths you have to grow into."

"In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table."

"Given as much law as that man will be able to do anything and go anywhere, an the only trace of pessimism left in the human prospect today is a faint flavour that one was born so soon."

"Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo."

"If you fell down yesterday, stand up today."

"Growing a little tiresome on account of some mysterious internal discomfort that the local practitioner diagnosed as imagination."

"Had Moreau had any intelligible object, I could have sympathized at least a little with him. I am not so squeamish about pain as that. I could have forgiven him a little even, had his motive been only hate. But he was so irresponsible, so utterly careless! His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on; and the Things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at last to die painfully."

"We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity."

"The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it."

"Cynicism is humour in ill health."

"It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not pay with their own."

"There's nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn't abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile."

"Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community."

"A federation of all humanity, together with a sufficient measure of social justice, to ensure health, education, and a rough equality of opportunity to most of the children born into the world, would mean such a release and increase of human energy as to open a new phase in human history."

"Already he knew something of the history of the intervening years. He had heard now of the moral decay that had followed the collapse of supernatural religion in the minds of ignoble man, the decline of public honour, the ascendency of wealth. For men who had lost their belief in God had still kept their faith in property, and wealth ruled a venial world."

"But giving drugs to a cat is no joke, Kemp!"

"As night goes round the Earth always there are hundreds of thousands of people who should be sleeping, lying awake, fearing a bully, fearing a cruel competition, dreading lest they cannot make good, ill of some illness they cannot comprehend, distressed by some irrational quarrel, maddened by some thwarted instinct or some suppressed perverted desire."

"A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own."

"We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries."

"The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn."

"Cynicism is humor in ill health."

"No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft."

"Hunger and a lack of blood-corpuscles take all the manhood from a man."

"You cannot imagine the craving for rest that I feel-a hunger and thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of thoughts leading nowhere, spinning round swift and steady."

"To Europe she was America. To America she was the gateway to the earth. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social history of the world."

"For it is just this question of pain that partsus. So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your ownpains drive you; so long as pain underlies your propositions aboutsin,-so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurelywhat an animal feels."

"The new mathematics is a sort of supplement to language, affording a means of thought about form and quantity and a means of expression,more exact,compact, and ready than ordinary language. The great body of physical science, a great deal of the essential facts of financial science, and endless social and political problems are only accessible and thinkable to those who have had a sound training in mathematical analysis, and the time may not be very remote when it will be understood that for complete initiation as an efficient citizen of one of the new great complex world wide states that are now developing, it is as necessary to be able to compute, to think in averages and maxima and minima, as it is now to be able to read and write."

"And the great difference between man and monkey is in the larynx."

"Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge."

"One of those pertinacious tempers that would warm every day to a white heat and never again cool to forgiveness."

"The past is but the beginning of a beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn."

"It is when suffering finds a voice andsets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us."

"He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself."

"The essential question was always "Who are these fellows who give us orders? By what warrant? And how do we benefit and how does the world benefit? But they are doing no good to anyone, no real good even to themselves! This is not government and leadership; this is imposture. Why stand it?...Why stand it?"

"The doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought."

"Jesus was a penniless teacher who wandered about the dusty sun-bit country of Judea, living upon casual gifts of food; yet he is always represented clean, combed, and sleek, in spotless raiment, erect, and with something motionless about him as though he was gliding through the air. This alone has made him unreal and incredible to many people who cannot distinguish the core of the story from the ornamental and unwise additions of the unintelligently devout."

"And there it was, on a shabby bed in a tawdry, ill-lighted bedroom, surrounded by a crowd of ignorant and excited people, broken and wounded, betrayed and unpitied, that Griffin, the first of all men to make himself invisible, Griffin, the most gifted physicist the world has ever seen, ended in infinite disaster his strange and terrible career."

"Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him."

"The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow."

"I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then."