We know too much and feel too little. At least, we feel too little of those creative emotions from which a good life springs.

Americans and Englishmen, when they become acquainted with the Balkans, feel an astonished contempt when they study the mutual enmities of Bulgarians and Serbs, of Hungarians and Rumanians. It is evident to them that these enmities are absurd and that the belief of each little nation in its own superiority has no objective basis. But most of them are quite unable to see that the national pride of a Great Power is essentially as unjustifiable as that of a little Balkan country.

The luxury to disparage freedom is the privilege of those who already possess it.

We have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogey regrettably surviving from a bygone age.

No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.

When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning-rod, the clergy, both in England and America, with enthusiastic support of George III, condemned it as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God.

I suppose the advocates of unreason think that there is a better chance of profitably deceiving the populace if they keep it in a state of effervescence.