The belief that we some day shall be able to prevent war is to me one with the belief in the possibility of making humanity really human.

Formerly, a nation that broke the peace, did not trouble to try and prove to the world that it was done solely from higher motives. ... Now war has a bad conscience. Now every nation assures us that it is bleeding for a human cause, the fate of which hangs in the balance of its victory ... No nation dares to admit the guilt of blood before the world.

All philanthropy ... is only a savory fumigation burning at the mouth of a sewer. This incense offering makes the air more endurable to passers-by, but it does not hinder the infection in the sewer from spreading.

The educator must above all understand how to wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present.

The very forces that liberty has set free work against the dangerous consequences of liberty.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

The emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen.