Society and the World

To save your world you asked this man to die:

Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?

The main effort, for now many years, has been a critical effort; the endeavours, in all branches of knowledge—theology, philosophy, history, art, science—to see the object as in itself it really is.

The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.

Whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age … Home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties! of Oxford

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light … He who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and the will of God prevail.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light … He who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and the will of God prevail.

And we are here as on a darkling plain

He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

We make war that we may live in peace.

The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue … Moreover this activity must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy.

Every art and every investigation, and likewise every practical pursuit or undertaking, seems to aim at some good: hence it has been well said that the Good is That at which all things aim.

They teach to talk unjustly, and—prevail.

Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative on the day after the revolution.

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

‘But the Emperor has nothing on at all!’ cried a little child.

Written laws are like spiders’ webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

Written laws are like spiders’ webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.

on expanding universities

on expanding universities