The liberation of the human mind has never been furthered by ... dunderheads; it has been furthered by gay fellows who heaved dead cats into sanctuaries and then went roistering down the highways of the world, proving to all men that doubt , after all, was safe - that the god in the sanctuary was finite in his power, and hence a fraud. One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms. It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent.
- Prejudices, Fourth Series
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Any questioning of the moral ideas that prevail - the principal business, it must be plain, of the novelist, the serious dramatist, the professed inquirer into human motives and acts - is received with the utmost hostility. To attempt such an enterprise is to disturb the peace - and the disturber of the peace, in the national view, quickly passes over into the downright criminal.
- A Book of Prefaces