“In most commercial ways we’re a pretty forward country. In these moral ways we’re content to be a pretty backward country.”

“The modern mind is hard to please; and it generally calls the way of Godfrey ferocious and the way of Francis fanatical. That is, it calls any moral method unpractical, when it has just called any practical method immoral.”

“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.”

“My first and last philosophy ... I learnt in the nursery... The things I believed then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales... They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic... Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth ... I knew the magic beanstalk before I tasted beans; I was sure of the Man in the Moon before I was certain of the moon.I am concerned with a certain way of looking at life, which was created in me by the fairy tales, but has since been meekly ratified by the mere facts.”

“The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht.”

“They are constantly colonists and emigrants ; they have the name of being at home in every country. But they are in exile in their own country. They are torn between love of home and love of something else; of which the sea may be the explanation or may be only the symbol. It is also found in a nameless nursery rhyme which is the finest line in English literature and the dumb refrain of all English poems, 'Over the hills and far away.”

“My country, right or wrong,” is a thing that no patriot would think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying, “My mother, drunk or sober.”