“Wine is a great danger, especially because it doesn't bring truth to the surface. Anything but the truth, indeed: it reveals especially the past and forgotten history of the individual rather than his present wish; it capriciously flings into the light also all the half-baked ideas with which in a more or less recent period one has toyed and then forgotten.”

Nobel lecture (2001)
Context: The idea that there is one people in possession of the truth, one answer to the world’s ills, or one solution to humanity’s needs, has done untold harm throughout history — especially in the last century. Today, however, even amidst continuing ethnic conflict around the world, there is a growing understanding that human diversity is both the reality that makes dialogue necessary, and the very basis for that dialogue.
We understand, as never before, that each of us is fully worthy of the respect and dignity essential to our common humanity. We recognize that we are the products of many cultures, traditions and memories; that mutual respect allows us to study and learn from other cultures; and that we gain strength by combining the foreign with the familiar.

Ma Ying-jeou (2015) cited in: " President presents ROC flag to son of war heroine http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aedu/201507030021.aspx" in Focus Taiwan, 3 July 2015.
Statement made in launching the two exhibitions on Chinese people's lives during Second Sino-Japanese War, 3 July 2015.
Political issues

2010s, 2016, Donald Trump and the fitness threshold (2016)

Source: Straight Man (1997), Ch. 2.

Source: Other People

In a Speech of Benedict XVI at the Inauguration of the Convention of the Diocese of Rome http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2007/june/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20070611_convegno-roma_en.html, at the Basilica of Saint John Lateran (11 June 2007)
2007

"The Future of Democracy" http://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/what-i-saw-in-america/19/
What I Saw in America (1922)
Context: The last hundred years has seen a general decline in the democratic idea. If there be anybody left to whom this historical truth appears a paradox, it is only because during that period nobody has been taught history, least of all the history of ideas. If a sort of intellectual inquisition had been established, for the definition and differentiation of heresies, it would have been found that the original republican orthodoxy had suffered more and more from secessions, schisms, and backslidings. The highest point of democratic idealism and conviction was towards the end of the eighteenth century, when the American Republic was 'dedicated to the proposition that all men are equal.' It was then that the largest number of men had the most serious sort of conviction that the political problem could be solved by the vote of peoples instead of the arbitrary power of princes and privileged orders.

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 133.