Society and the World

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it; and thus to know anything you must know all.

Judges commonly are elderly men, and are more likely to hate at sight any analysis to which they are not accustomed, and which disturbs repose of mind, than to fall in love with novelties.

Florence she found perfectly sweet, Naples a dream, but very whiffy. In Rome one had simply to sit still and feel.

Florence she found perfectly sweet, Naples a dream, but very whiffy. In Rome one had simply to sit still and feel.

Beware of the community in which blasphemy does not exist: underneath, atheism runs rampant.

The joy of life is to put out one’s power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this.

Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority.

There never was an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try' to be “consistent.”

We must not roughly smash other people’s idols because we know, or think we know, that they are of cheap human manufacture.

We are always making God our accomplice, that so we may legalize our own iniquities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity.

In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself.

Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.

A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or, to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there.

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man’s pleasure when they come a cropper.

Government and co-operation are in all things the laws of life; anarchy and competition the laws of death.

Government and co-operation are in all things the laws of life; anarchy and competition the laws of death.

The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable. Good-breeding is surface-Christianity.

The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable. Good-breeding is surface-Christianity.

Freedom is a very great reality. But it means, above all things, freedom from lies.

Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms and social intercourse.

Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.