Society and the World

Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.

At the University every great treatise is postponed until its author attains impartial judgment and perfect knowledge. If a horse could wait as long for its shoes and would pay for them in advance, our blacksmiths would all be college dons.

A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge: it is more dangerous than ignorance.

The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent's first duty.

The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child's character.

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman.

The relation of superior to inferior excludes good manners.

Equality is fundamental in every department of social organization.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.