The old assumption of the approximate impossibility of war really rested on a similar assumption about the impossibility of evil-and especially of evil in high places.
The issue is now clear. It is between light and darkness and everyone must choose his side.
A feminist is someone who loathes being a woman and who dislikes the chief feminine characteristics.
Each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.
He said he didn’t very well understand how George was going to sleep any more than he did now, seeing that there were only twenty-four hours in each day.
The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare tomorrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before.
The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them. The Titans did not scale heaven; but they laid waste the world.
Progress is the mother of problems.
Children feel the whiteness of the lily with a graphic and passionate clearness which we cannot give them at all. The only thing we can give them is information-the information that if you break the lily in two it won’t grow again.
Family is the theatre of the spiritual drama, the place where things happen, especially the things that matter.
All real democracy is an attempt like that of a jolly hostess to bring the shy people out.
The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed.
All that we call spirit and art and ecstacy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.
What a glorious garden of wonders the lights of Broadway would be to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read.
Only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticize the State. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city.
A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a woman.
The average woman is at the head of something with which she can do as she likes; the average man has to obey orders and do nothing else.
Art is the signature of man.
Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.
The Devil’s walking parody; On all four-footed things.