The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good - anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name 'leaders' for those who were once 'rulers'. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, 'Mind your own business.' Our whole lives are their business.

A man is never so proud as when striking an attitude of humility.

How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?

You all know," said the Guide, "that security is mortals' greatest enemy.

Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think...of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the 'right' notes and the 'wrong' ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.

People who know a lot of the same things can hardly help talking about them.

No good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights.