Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.

Words are seductive and dangerous material, to be used with caution.

The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.

The story and study of the past, both recent and distant, will not reveal the future, but it flashes beacon lights along the way and it is a useful nostrum against despair.

After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening, on a lucky day, without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.

The poets have familiarized more people with history than have the historians.

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.