Even the sober desire for progress is sustained by faith—faith in the intrinsic goodness of human nature and in the omnipotence of science. It is a defiant and blasphemous faith, not unlike that held by the men who set out to build a "city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven" and who believed that "nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.

When we do not do the one thing we ought to do, we have no time for anything else - we are the busiest people in the world.

The conservatism of a religion - it's orthodoxy - is the inert coagulum of a once highly reactive sap.

Sometimes we feel the loss of a prejudice as a loss of vigor.

The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate.

Without a sense of proportion there can be neither good taste nor genuine intelligence, nor perhaps moral integrity.