“most cannibalism is not a primitive or even a bestial habit. It is artificial and even artistic; a sort of art for art's sake. Men do not do it because they do not think it horrible; but, on the contrary, because they do think it horrible...It is by no means clear, so far as I know that the Eskimos ever indulged in human sacrifice. They were not civilised enough.”

“But the more shrewdly and earnestly we study the histories of men, the less ready shall we be to make use of the word ‘artificial.’ Nothing in the world has ever been artificial. Many customs, many dresses, many works of art are branded with artificiality because the exhibit vanity and self-consciousness: as if vanity were not a deep and elemental thing, like love and hate and the fear of death. Vanity may be found in darkling deserts, in the hermit and in the wild beasts that crawl around him. It may be good or evil, but assuredly it is not artificial: vanity is a voice out of the abyss.”

“Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of hte god within.”

“I hold it clear, therefore, if anything is clear about thebusiness, that the Eugenists do not merely mean that the mass ofcommon men should settle each other's marriages between them; thequestion remains, therefore, whom they do instinctively trust whenthey say that this or that ought to be done. What is this flyingand evanescent authority that vanishes wherever we seek to fix it?Who is the man who is the lost subject that governs the Eugenist'sverb? In a large number of cases I think we can simply say that theindividual Eugenist means himself, and nobody else.”

“My own general thesis was somewhat to this effect: that Artists have worried the world by being wantonly, needlessly, and gratuitously progressive. Politicians have to be progressive; that is, they have to live in the future, because they know they have done nothing but evil in the past. But Artists, who have been right from the beginning of the world, who were, perhaps, the only people who were right even in the beginning of the world, decorating pottery or designing rude frescoes on the rock when other people were fighting or offering human sacrifice, they have no right to despise their own past.”

“The horrible thing about all legal officials, even the best, about all judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policeman, is not that they are wicked (some of them are good), not that they are stupid (several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply that they have got used to it. Strictly they do not see the prisoner in the dock; all they see is the usual man in the usual place. They do not see the awful court of judgment; they only see their own workshop.”

“I do not know by what extraordinary mental accident modern writers so constantly connect the idea of progress with the idea of independent thinking.”