Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“ And the reason that English politicians work together in unity is certainly not that they are English. It is that they have nothing to do; when, for instance, they had James II to dethrone, or when they had Walpole to howl against, or when they had Napoleon to fight, they behaved exactly as the French and the Irish do; parties were broken by secessions; heads were broken by sticks.
We are like the two little boys walking along the sands. We go together easily enough as long as we are going nowhere. We can do as others do cheerfully enough, as long as we are doing nothing. ”

“ All Englishmen join in reviling that lovable and admirable English thing, the English climate. Everybody blasphemously rails against those mutable and magnificent skies which are a perpetual transformation scene. ”

“ Only a dim and blind gregarious instinct, a brotherhood as deep as the brutes, leads them to do nothing together and to go nowhere together. They do not speak, they are too weary even to quarrel, though they have made no exertion; they are sunk in that strange and sudden and very occasional boredom which belongs to boyhood, and which is like all boyhood's experiences, like its love and its fear, pure and intense, the undiluted essence of ennui. ”