Perhaps the prevalence of pedantry may be largely accounted for by the common error of thinking that, because useful knowledge should be remembered, any kind of knowledge that is at all worth learning should be remembered too.

There's only one way to improve society. Present it with a single improved unit: yourself.

The glossary of politics is so full of euphemistic words and phrases - as in the nature of things it must be - that one would suppose politicians must sometimes strain their wits to coin them.

If you do not want the State to act like a criminal, you must disarm it as you would a criminal; you must keep it weak. The State will always be criminal in proportion to its strength; a weak State will always be as criminal as it can be, or dare be, but if it is kept down to the proper limit of weakness - which, by the way, is a vast deal lower limit than people are led to believe - its criminality may be safely got on with.

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another, there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.

Perhaps one reason for the falling-off of belief in a continuance of conscious existence is to be found in the quality of life that most of us lead. There is not much in it with which, in any kind of reason, one can associate the idea of immortality.

Considered now as a possession, one may define culture as the residuum of a large body of useless knowledge that has been well and truly forgotten.