... the greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

Modern man no longer regards Nature as in any sense divine and feels perfectly free to behave toward her as an overweening conqueror and tyrant.

A love of nature keeps no factories busy.

Words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study.

A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.