# Quote — G. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

> It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. They might have called Sunday the super-man. If any such creature be conceivable, he looked, indeed, somewhat like it, with his earth-shaking abstraction, as of a stone statue walking. He might have been called something above man, with his large plans, which were too obvious to be detected, with his large face, which was too frank to be understood. But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not quite coward enough to admire it.

- Author: [G. Chesterton](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton.md)
- Book: [The Man Who Was Thursday](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/the-man-who-was-thursday.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Was_Thursday#Ch._VI_:_The_Exposure) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/the-man-who-was-thursday/it-never-occurred

## More from this book

> "A man's brain is a bomb," he cried out, loosening suddenly his strange passion and striking his own skull with violence. "My brain feels like a bomb, night and day. It must expand! It must expand! A man's brain must expand, if it breaks up the universe."
>
> "I don't want the universe broken up just yet," drawled the Marquis. "I want to do a lot of beastly things before I die. I thought of one yesterday in bed."

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/the-man-who-was-thursday/a-mans-brain.md)

> "First of all, what is it really all about? What is it you object to? You want to abolish Government?"
>
> "To abolish God!" said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. "We do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong."
>
> "And Right and Left," said Syme with a simple eagerness, "I hope you will abolish them too. They are much more troublesome to me."

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/the-man-who-was-thursday/first-of-all.md)

> It seemed a symbol of human faith and valour that while the skies were darkening that high place of the earth was bright. The devils might have captured heaven, but they had not yet captured the cross. He had a new impulse to tear out the secret of this dancing, jumping and pursuing paralytic; and at the entrance of the court as it opened upon the Circus he turned, stick in hand, to face his pursuer.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/g-chesterton/the-man-who-was-thursday/it-seemed-a-symbol.md)