"Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal, The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way; Even to-day your royal head may fall — I think I will not hang myself to-day."

"To-morrow is the time I get my pay — My uncle’s sword is hanging in the hall — I see a little cloud all pink and grey — Perhaps the rector’s mother will not call — I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall That mushrooms could be cooked another way — I never read the works of Juvenal — I think I will not hang myself to-day.The world will have another washing day; The decadents decay; the pedants pall; And H. G. Wells has found that children play, And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall; Rationalists are growing rational — And through thick woods one finds a stream astray, So secret that the very sky seems small — I think I will not hang myself to-day."

"The strangest whim has seized me. ... After all I think I will not hang myself to-day."

"The gallows in my garden, people say, Is new and neat and adequately tall."

"Prince, Prince-Elective on the modern plan, Fulfilling such a lot of People’s Wills, You take the Chiltern Hundreds while you can— A storm is coming on the Chiltern Hills."

"Prince, Bayard would have smashed his sword To see the sort of knights you dub — Is that the last of them — O Lord Will someone take me to a pub?"

"They spoke of Progress spiring round, Of Light and Mrs. Humphry Ward — It is not true to say I frowned, Or ran about the room and roared; I might have simply sat and snored — I rose politely in the club And said, “I feel a little bored; Will someone take me to a pub?”"

"I’ll read "Jack Redskin on the Quest" And feed my brain with better things."

"But for the Virtuous Things you do, The Righteous Work, the Public Care, It shall not be forgiven you."

"Heaven shall forgive you Bridge at dawn, The clothes you wear — or do not wear — And Ladies’ Leap-frog on the lawn And dyes and drugs, and petits verres."

"Talk about the pews and steeples And the cash that goes therewith! But the souls of Christian peoples... Chuck it, Smith!"

"Are they clinging to their crosses?"

"It is all as of old, the empty clangour, The scrawled on a five-foot page, The huckster who, mocking holy anger, Painfully paints his face with rage. * * * We that fight till the world is free, We have no comfort in victory; We have read each other as Cain his brother, We know each other, these slaves and we."

"For we that fight till the world is free, We are not easy in victory: We have known each other too long, my brother, And fought each other, the world and we."

"Our chiefs said 'Done,' and I did not deem it; Our seers said 'Peace,' and it was not peace; Earth will grow worse till men redeem it, And wars more evil, ere all wars cease."

"I am not fighting a hopeless fight. People who have fought in real fights don't, as a rule."

"For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen, Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green."

"My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage, Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,"

"The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head."

"Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode, The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road."

"Men that are men again: Who goes home? Tocsin and trumpeter! Who goes home? For there's blood on the grass and blood on the foam, And blood on the body, when Man comes home. And a voice valedictory: Who is for victory? Who is for liberty? Who goes home?"

"In the city set upon slime and loam, They cry in their Parliament, "Who goes home?" And there comes no answer in arch or dome, For none in the city of graves goes home. Yet these shall perish and understand, For God has pity on this great land."

"But since he stood for England And knew what England means, Unless you give him bacon You mustn’t give him beans."

"The rich are the scum of the earth in every country."

"There is no great harm in the theorist who makes up a new theory to fit a new event. But the theorist who starts with a false theory and then sees everything as making it come true is the most dangerous enemy of human reason."

"He was, if ever there was one, an inspired poet. I do not think it the highest sort of poet. And you never discover who is an inspired poet until the inspiration goes."

"It is largely because the free-thinkers, as a school, have hardly made up their minds whether they want to be more optimist or more pessimist than Christianity that their small but sincere movement has failed."

"He did not know the way things were going: he was too Victorian to understand the Victorian epoch. He did not know enough ignorant people to have heard the news."

"Dogma does not mean the absence of thought, but the end of thought."

"The central idea of poetry is the idea of guessing right, like a child."

"A man making the confession of any creed worth ten minutes' intelligent talk, is always a man who gains something and gives up something. So long as he does both he can create: for he is making an outline and a shape."

"The mind moves by instincts, associations and premonitions and not by fixed dates or completed processes. Action and reaction will occur simultaneously: or the cause actually be found after the effect. Errors will be resisted before they have been properly promulgated: notions will be first defined long after they are dead."

"It is a quaint comment on the notion that the English are practical and the French merely visionary, that we were rebels in arts while they were rebels in arms."

"Marriage is a duel to the death, which no man of honour should decline."

"The academic mind reflects infinity, and is full of light by the simple process of being shallow and standing still."

"As for science and religion, the known and admitted facts are few and plain enough. All that the parsons say is unproved. All that the doctors say is disproved. That's the only difference between science and religion there's ever been, or will be."

"Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas ... for it is the assertion of a universal negative"

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."

"If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."

"But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing toward a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it particularly nasty."

"Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese."

"It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, "Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe," or "Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet." They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complex picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority."

"I swear to you, then," said MacIan, after a pause. "I swear to you that nothing shall come between us. I swear to you that nothing shall be in my heart or in my head till our swords clash together. I swear it by the God you have denied, by the Blessed Lady you have blasphemed; I swear it by the seven swords in her heart. I swear it by the Holy Island where my fathers are, by the honour of my mother, by the secret of my people, and by the chalice of the Blood of God." The atheist drew up his head. "And I," he said, "give my word."

"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."

"[A]rt is limitation. [...] The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame."

"Fairy tales...are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear."

"Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before."