A large city cannot be experientially known; its life is too manifold for any individual to be able to participate in it.

People are much too solemn about things - I'm all for sticking pins into episcopal behinds.

In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind.

Under the present dispensation, the great majority of factories are little despotisms, benevolent in some cases, malevolent in others. Even where benevolence prevails, passive obedience is demanded by the workers, who are ruled by overseers, not of their own election, but appointed from above. In theory they may be the subjects of a democratic state; but in practice they spend the whole of their working lives as the subjects of a petty tyrant.

The business of a seer is to see; and if he involves himself in the kind of God-eclipsing activities which make seeing impossible, he betrays the trust which his fellows have tacitly placed in him.

Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead.