Society and the World

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible.

A wise man recognizes the convenience of a general statement, but he bows to the authority of a particular fact.

It is not that the Englishman can't feel—it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks—his pipe might fall out if he did.

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the power of being magnanimous.

The masses are the material of democracy, but its form—that is to say, the laws which express the general reason, justice, and utility—can only be rightly shaped by wisdom, which is by no means a universal property.

The art of creation / is older than the art of killing.

What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.

In the dust where we have buried the silent races and their abominations we have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.