- "We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green."
- "Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything."
- "Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, 'Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good—' At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their unmedieval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark."
- "When all are sexless there will be equality. There will be no women and no men. There will be but a fraternity, free and equal. The only consoling thought is that it will endure but for one generation."
- "Satire has weakened in our epoch for several reasons, but chiefly, I think, because the world has become too absurd to be satirized."
- "The trouble with modern England is not how many or how few people vote. It is that, however many people vote, a small ring of administrators do what they please."
- "It is only by believing in God that we can ever criticize the Government. Once abolish the God, and the Government becomes the God."
- "The special mark of the modern world is not that it is skeptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it."
- "The dim democracies of the valleys, while a few prigs on platforms are talking about oneness and absorption in the All, the folk that dwell in all the valleys of this ancient earth are renewing the very varieties forever with them. A woman is loved for being unmanly and a man loved for being unwomanly. With them the Church and the home are both beautiful because they are both different. With them fields are personal and flags are sacred. They are the virtue of existence for they are not mankind but men."
- "The weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. They first assume that no man will want more than his share, and then are very ingenious in explaining whether his share will be delivered by motor-car or balloon."
