“Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.”

“If we want to give poor people soap we must set out deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will not make them rich enough to be clean, then empathically we must do what we did with the saints. We must reverence them for being dirty.”

“There are some desires that are not desirable.” 

“It is the main earthly business of a human being to make his home, and the immediate surroundings of his home, as symbolic and significant to his own imagination as he can.”

“The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why.” 

“The more we are proud that the Bethlehem story is plain enough to be understood by the shepherds, and almost by the sheep, the more do we let ourselves go, in dark and gorgeous imaginative frescoes or pageants about the mystery and majesty of the Three Magian Kings.”

“Modern broad-mindedness benefits the rich; and benefits nobody else.” 

“What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business.”

“If a man called Christmas Day a mere hypocritical excuse for drunkeness and gluttony, that would be false, but it would have a fact hidden in it somewhere. But when Bernard Shaw says that Christmas Day is only a conspiracy kept up by Poulterers and wine merchants from strictly business motives, then he says something which is not so much false as startling and arrestingly foolish. He might as well say that the two sexes were invented by jewellers who wanted to sell wedding rings.”

“Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.” 

“One of the chief uses of religion is that it makes us remember our coming from darkness, the simple fact that we are created.” 

“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.”

If there were no God, there would be no atheists.”

“There are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.” 

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

“The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”

“It has been often said, very truely, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.”

“Theology is only thought applied to religion.”

“The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.” 

“These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.” 

“Puritanism was an honourable mood; it was a noble fad. In other words, it was a highly creditable mistake.”

“A man imagines a happy marriage as a marriage of love; even if he makes fun of marriages that are without love, or feels sorry for lovers who are without marriage.”

“Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men.” 

“The whole pleasure of marriage is that it is a perpetual crisis.”

“A good man’s work is effected by doing what he does, a woman’s by being what she is.”

“Women have a thirst for order and beauty as for something physical; there is a strange female power of hating ugliness and waste as good men can only hate sin and bad men virtue.”

“I never could see anything wrong in sensationalism; and I am sure our society is suffering more from secrecy than from flamboyant revelations.” 

“With all that we hear of American hustle and hurry, it is rather strange that Americans seem to like to linger on longer words.”

“It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.”

“I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that, while they are always talking about things as problems, they have hardly any notion of what a real problem is.”

“Over-civilization and barbarism are within an inch of each other. And a mark of both is the power of medicine-men.” 

“By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men.” –

“The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies.”

“Self-denial is the test and definition of self-government.” 

“Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.” 

“Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.”

“America is the only country ever founded on a creed.” – “What is America?”

“The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.”

“The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.” 

“When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.”

“Men are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern.”

“If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will have no answer except slanging or silence.” 

“He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative.” 

“You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution. 

“For fear of the newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for the newspapers.” 

“When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.” 

“It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular.” 

“I have formed a very clear conception of patriotism. I have generally found it thrust into the foreground by some fellow who has something to hide in the background. I have seen a great deal of patriotism; and I have generally found it the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

“It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.” 

“There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants.”