We don't want to change. Every change is a menace to stability.

There's only one effectively redemptive sacrifice, the sacrifice of self-will to make room for the knowledge of God.

Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.

The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything

Industrial man—a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.

We are not our own any more than what we possess is our own. We did not make ourselves, we cannot be supreme over ourselves. We are not our own masters.

The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.