"Political correctness, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has
succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed."
---Heretics,
chap. 1
"The vice of the modern notion of mental progress is that it is always
something concerned with the breaking of bonds, the effacing of boundaries, the
casting away of dogmas. But if there be such a thing as mental growth, it must
mean the growth into more and more definite convictions, into more and more
dogmas. The human brain is a machine for coming to conclusions; if it cannot
come to conclusions it is rusty. When we hear of a man too clever to believe, we
are hearing of something having almost the character of a contradiction in
terms. It is like hearing of a nail that was too good to hold down a carpet; or
a bolt that was too strong to keep a door shut. Man can hardly be defined, after
the fashion of Carlyle, as an animal who makes tools; ants and beavers and many
other animals make tools, in the sense that they make an apparatus. Man can be
defined as an animal that makes dogmas. As he piles doctrine on doctrine and
conclusion on conclusion in the formation of some tremendous scheme of
philosophy and religion, he is, in the only legitimate sense of which the
expression is capable, becoming more and more human. When he drops one doctrine
after another in a refined skepticism, when he declines to tie himself to a
system, when he says that he has outgrown definitions, when he says that he
disbelieves in finality, when, in his own imagination, he sits as God, holding
no form of creed but contemplating all, then he is by that very process sinking
slowly backwards into the vagueness of the vagrant animals and the
unconsciousness of the grass. Trees have no dogmas. Turnips are singularly
broad-minded.
If then, I repeat, there is to be mental advance, it must be mental advance in
the construction of a definite philosophy of life. And that philosophy of life
must be right and the other philosophies wrong."
---Heretics, chap. 20
"I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the
mouth, is to shut it again on something solid."
---Autobiography, chap. 10
"Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who
utters a doubt defines a religion. And the skepticism of our time does not
really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and
their plain and defiant shape. .... We who are Christians never knew the great
philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian
writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on.
Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable
position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to
assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a
mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify
that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green
in summer or that men are not women and women are not men. We shall be left
defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but
something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us
in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We
shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We
shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed."
---Heretics, chap. 20