“It is a sign of sharp sickness in a society when it is actually led by some special sort of lunatic.”

G.K. Chesterton in "The Miser and His Friends" in Alberto Manguel, ed., On Lying in Bed, and Other Essays (emailed by a friend)

“The workmanship surpassed the material…”

Apollo’s palace, decorated by Vulcan, described in the Phaeton story in Thomas Bulfinch, Mythology of Greece and Rome

“the belief of French poststructuralism, exemplified by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, that the ‘subject’ – the thinking, single agent, the ‘I’ of every sentence, was an illusion: all you had left was language, not mentality… Once there were writers, but now there is only what Foucault derisively called ‘the author function.’”

Robert Hughes, Culture of Complaint

“It is natural to civilised man to go back upon his past, and to be grateful for all profit he can gain from the study of his own development. So we may be certain that the claim of Greece and Rome to our eternal gratitude will never cease to be asserted, and their right to teach us still what we could have learnt nowhere else will never be successfully disputed.”

W. Warde Fowler, Rome (written November 1911)

"Talent does what it can; genius does what it must."

Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) [the guy who also said "the pen is mightier than the sword" and started a novel "It was a dark and stormy night"]
 

"With God dead, there remains only history and power."

“Helen’s Exile” in Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays

"The truth is that I care more for my dog, donkey, and garden in the little English village where we live than for all the publicity in the world."

Frances Chesterton (GKC's wife), "to an American reporter during one of G.K.’s lecture tours”, quoted by Therese Warmus in Gilbert Magazine Vol. 8 #4 (Jan.-Feb. 2005)

“It was this century [the last before Christ] that produced most of the famous Romans whose names are familiar to us: the two Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Cicero, Caesar, and finally Augustus, all of whom helped in various ways to save Italy and the Empire from premature dissolution. It was, in fact, an age of great personalities, and one, too, in which personal character became as deeply interesting to the men of the time as it is even now to us.”

W. Warde Fowler, Rome.