“A man of my sort, who has traveled about the world in rough places, gets along perfectly well with two classes, what you may call the upper and the lower. He understands them and they understand him. I was at home with herds and tramps and roadmen, and I was sufficiently at my ease with people like Sir Walter and the men I had met the night before. I can’t explain why, but it is a fact. But what fellows like me don’t understand is the great comfortable, satisfied middle-class world, the folk that live in villas and suburbs. He doesn’t know how they look at things, he doesn’t understand their conventions, and he is as shy of them as of a black mamba.”

Narrator Richard Hannay in John Buchan The 39 Steps

“A strange lot this, to be dropped down in a world of barbarians – men who see clearly enough the barbarity of all ages except their own.”

Ernest Crosbie

“Rudolf, the mad alchemist king of Bohemia, spent most of his life trying to turn base metals into gold. Even he had a sane moment, though, when he asked his famulus: ‘Tell me, if we succeed, will gold still be worth anything?’ It’s a question diploma factories rarely ask.”

George Jonas in National Post May 7, 2015

“Thus it came to him merely to run away was folly, since he could not run away from himself.”

Sinclair Lewis Babbitt

“For I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.” Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Adams, 28 October 1813

“When children ask inconvenient questions it is the custom to say to them, ‘When you are older you will understand,’ a reply, generally speaking, justifying parricide. But the answer is not merely irritating; it is generally, I am sorry to say, a lie. The questions asked by children, as a rule, are questions that do not depend upon any matter of age: they are simple and unanswerable questions. When we grow up we rise superior to them, not by answering them, but merely by giving up. Logically, the parents ought only to say, ‘When you are older, you will not want to understand’ though it may certainly be said that if the first version of the reply would justify parricide on the part of the child the second version might justify suicide on his part.”

G.K. Chesterton, “The Abyss”

“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”

George Bernard Shaw The Doctor’s Dilemma

“The truest kinship with humanity would lie in doing as humanity has always done, accepting with a sportsmanlike relish the estate to which we are called.”

G.K. Chesterton in The Common Man, quoted in Gilbert! Vol. 3 #7 (June 2000)