Society and the World

The relation of superior to inferior excludes good manners.

The notion that the colonel need be a better man than the private is as confused as the notion that the keystone need be stronger than the coping stone.

Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.

The duke inquires contemptuously whether his gamekeeper is the equal of the Astronomer Royal; but he insists that they shall both be hanged equally if they murder him.

Nothing can be unconditional: consequently nothing can be free.

He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.

He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.

A colonial Imperialist is one who raises colonial troops, equips a colonial squadron, claims a Federal Parliament sending its measures to the Throne instead of to the Colonial Office, and, being finally brought by this means into insoluble conflict with the insular British Imperialist, "cuts the painter" and breaks up the Empire.

A colonial Imperialist is one who raises colonial troops, equips a colonial squadron, claims a Federal Parliament sending its measures to the Throne instead of to the Colonial Office, and, being finally brought by this means into insoluble conflict with the insular British Imperialist, "cuts the painter" and breaks up the Empire.

Excess of local self-assertion makes a colonist an Imperialist.

Excess of local self-assertion makes a colonist an Imperialist.

Excess of insularity makes a Briton an Imperialist.

Excess of insularity makes a Briton an Imperialist.

Democratic republics can no more dispense with national idols than monarchies with public functionaries.

Government presents only one problem: the discovery of a trustworthy anthropometric method.

If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.

The flunkeyism propagated by the throne is the price we pay for its political convenience.

The Court is the servant's hall of the sovereign.

Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.

Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination. When the process is interrupted by adversity at a critical age, as in the case of Charles II, the subject becomes sane and never completely recovers his kingliness.

He who slays a king and he who dies for him are alike idolaters.

A limited monarchy is a device for combining the inertia of a wooden idol with the credibility of a flesh and blood one.

When the wooden idol does not answer the peasant's prayer, he beats it: when the flesh and blood idol does not satisfy the civilized man, he cuts its head off.

The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters.