we should be careful not to let machinery swamp life. That we should be sure, when we are confronted with a fresh mechanical contrivance, that we are not losing more than we gain by adopting it.

As soon as you start asking what education is for, what the use of it is, you're abandoning the basic assumption of any true culture, that education is worth while for its own sake.

the essence of vulgarity seemed to lie in the pretence at being or the attempt to be, something that one really was not, with the resulting lack of ease and dignity and taste.

Americans ... attach such a fantastic importance to their baths and plumbing and gadgets of all sorts. They talk as if people could hardly be human beings without all that; we in Europe are beginning to wonder if people can be human beings with it.

In Europe, a product must be good, or it will not sell in competition with other products; with you, it is enough to say that it is good, often enough and sufficiently loudly. The keenest competition is not in the making of things but in the advertising of them!

What is freedom? It consists in two things: to know each his own limitations and accept them - that is the same thing as to know oneself, and accept oneself as one is, without fear, or envy, or distaste; and to recognise and accept the conditions under which one lives, also without fear or envy, or distaste. When you do this, you shall be free.

I do disapprove of the modern attitude that you can't do the simplest thing, like dying or being born, in your own house.