“The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be. And for my present purpose I specially insist on this abstract independence.”

“You!" he cried. "You never hated because you never lived. I know what you are all of you, from first to last--you are the people in power! You are the police--the great, fat smiling men in blue and buttons! You are the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been broken?”

“He is a man, I think," he said, "who cares for nothing but a joke. He is a dangerous man."Lambert laughed in the act of lifting some macaroni to his mouth."Dangerous!" he said. "You don't know little Quin, sir!""Every man is dangerous," said the old man, without moving, "Who cares only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself.”

“Mr. Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is mad on one Christian virtue: the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity. He has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive. Mr. Blatchford is not only an early Christian, he is the only early Christian who really ought to have been eaten by lions.”

“A man is perfectly entitled to laugh at a thing because he happens to find it incomprehensible. What he has no right to do is to laugh at it as incomprehensible, and then criticise it as if he comprehended it. The very fact of its unfamiliarity and mystery ought to set him thinking about the deeper causes that make people so different from himself, and that without merely assuming that they must be inferior to himself.”

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”