for X

Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day
“There was always hope that in talk, talk, talk he could alter the past, conjure the future, and impose an estimable image of himself upon the present.”
I cannot understand any democrat not seeing the danger of so distant and indirect a system of government. It is hard enough anywhere to get representatives to represent. It is hard enough to get a little town council to fulfil the wishes of a little town, even when the townsmen meet the town councillors every day in the street, and could kick them
... See moreG. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton • What I Saw in America
It’s easy—very easy—to slay a ruler. But it’s very difficult to prevent a worse one from coming to his place.”
Gene Wolfe • The Urth of the New Sun: The sequel to 'The Book of the New Sun'
A man does not want his national home destroyed or even changed, because he cannot even remember all the good things that go with it; just as he does not want his house burnt down, because he can hardly count all the things he would miss. Therefore he fights for what sounds like a hazy abstraction, but is really a house.
G K. Chesterton • The Everlasting Man (with linked TOC)
Nationalism
being—for what being can be stranger than oneself, or act more inexplicably?
Gene Wolfe • The Urth of the New Sun: The sequel to 'The Book of the New Sun'
They seem to express a sympathy with those who prefer “the right to earn outside the home” or (in other words) the right to be a wage-slave and work under the orders of a total stranger because he happens to be a richer man. By what conceivable contortions of twisted thought this ever came to be considered a freer condition than that of
... See moreG. K. Chesterton • The G. K. Chesterton Collection [50 Books]
'It's over, and can't be helped, and that's one consolation, as they always says in Turkey, ven they cuts the wrong man's head off.
CHARLES DICKENS • THE PICKWICK PAPERS (illustrated, complete, and unabridged)
To sum up our contention so far, we may say that the most characteristic current philosophies have not only a touch of mania, but a touch of suicidal mania. The mere questioner has knocked his head against the limits of human thought; and cracked it.
