Society and the World

Such is the patriot’s boast, where’er we roam,

If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.

 

What a satire, by the way, is that machine [Charles Babbage’s calculating machine] on the mere mathematician! A Frankenstein-monster, a thing without brains and without heart, too stupid to make a blunder; that turns out results like a corn-sheller, and never grows any wiser or better, though it grind a thousand bushels of them!

 

[ Of Ronald Reagan :] For seven and a half years I have worked alongside him and I am proud to be his partner. We have had triumphs, we have made mistakes, we have had sex.

 

If you direct your whole thought to work itself, none of the things which invade eyes or ears will reach the mind.

A woman can be anything that the man who loves her would have her be.

A delicate wit is a corruption which a nation takes a long time to acquire. It is only worn-out nations that possess it.

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists.

[Tolerance] is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.

There is one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of mind suffers, as compared with the man of action. While he is talcing an enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he lets his chance slip through his fingers.

Taste is the fundamental quality which sums up all other qualities. It is the ne plus ultra of the intelligence.

Thinking is hard work. One can’t bear burdens and ideas at the same time.

Those who wish to seem learned to fools, seem fools to the learned. .

Man becomes man only by the intelligence, but he is man only by the heart.

The trouble is that everyone talks about reforming others, and no one thinks about reforming himself.

In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or exist in extreme boredom...Make no mistake all intellectuals are deviants in the U.S.

Man has his will - but woman has her way.

The greater man the greater courtesy.

The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence but in the mastery of his passions.

It is well to write love letters. There are certain things for which it is not easy to ask your mistress face to face, like money for instance.

The trust of the innocent is the liar's most useful tool.

We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

 

Kind hearts are more than coronets,

 

And trust me not at all or all in all.