You must believe that you can help bring about a better world. A good society is produced only by good individuals, just as truly as a majority in a presidential election is produced by the votes of single electors.

Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent

I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment.

The wise man thinks about his troubles only when there is some purpose in doing so; at other times he thinks about other things, or, if it is night, about nothing at all.

Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power.

A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy dare live.

In the higher walks of politics the same sort of thing occurs. The statesman who has gradually concentrated all power within himself ... may have had anything but a public motive... The phrases which are customary on the platform and in the Party Press have gradually come to him to seem to express truths, and he mistakes the rhetoric of partisanship for a genuine analysis of motives... He retires from the world after the world has retired from him.