The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]

(and whose way of looking at the world is to put on the latest and most powerful scientific spectacles, and then shut their eyes),

This is the rooted weakness of our time. Science, which means exactitude, has become the mother of all inexactitude.

The august accident of that Spanish defeat may perhaps have coincided only too well with their concentration on the non–Christian parts of Scripture. It may have satisfied a certain Old Testament sentiment of the election of the English being announced in the stormy oracles of air and sea, which was easily turned into that heresy of a tribal pride

“there are a great many good people, and a great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind of coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people are wicked. You are the only person I know of here who is honest and has also some common sense.

the English plutocrat began to understand not only that the poor were impotent, but that their impotence had been his only power. The truth was not merely that his riches had left them poor; it was that nothing but their poverty could have been strong enough to make him rich.

The experiences of the Founder of Christianity have perhaps left us in a vague doubt of the infallibility of courts of law.

The sight of a millionaire is seldom, in the ordinary sense, an enchanting sight: nevertheless, he is in his way an enchanter. As they say in the gushing articles about him in the magazines, he is a fascinating personality. So is a snake.

But it seems to amuse them to make again, if possible in a church, a promise they have already broken in practice and almost avowedly disbelieve in principle.

But if you ask him what he can conquer—he can conquer the stars. Thus comes the thing called Romance, a purely Christian product. A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.