Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant it has deposed.

One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.

The writer's object is - or should be - to hold the reader's attention.

Confronted by menace, or what is perceived as menace, governments will usually attempt to smash it, rarely to examine it, understand it, define it.

Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library.

In America, where the electoral process is drowning in commercial techniques of fund-raising and image-making, we may have completed a circle back to a selection process as unconcerned with qualifications as that which made Darius King of Persia. ... he whose horse was the first to neigh at sunrise should be King.

Books are the carriers of civilization... Books are humanity in print.