'"...We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous crininals. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential idea of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish that the property to become their property that they might more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property, they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Muderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's."'
GK Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, p.44.
