The monstrosity of bureaucracy, I thought: always the pint-pot judging the gallon, the scribe's, the door-keeper's world. Always the stupidity of people who feel certain about things they never try to find out. A world that educates people to be ignorant - that is what this world of ours is.

The true gardener then brushes over the ground with slow and gentle hand, to liberate a space for breath round some favorites; but he is not thinking about destruction except incidentally. It is only the amateur like myself who becomes obsessed and rejoices with a sadistic pleasure in weeds that are big and bad enough to pull, and at last, almost forgetting the flowers altogether, turns into a Reformer.

Things good in themselves ... perfectly valid in the integrity of their origins, become fetters if they cannot alter.

every frontier is doomed to produce an opposition beyond it. Nothing short of the universal can build the unfenced peace.

Fair and unfair are among the most influential words in English and must be delicately used.

On the whole, age comes more gently to those who have some doorway into an abstract world-art, or philosophy, or learning-regions where the years are scarcely noticed and the young and old can meet in a pale truthful light.

I do think we should be provided with a new body about the age of thirty or so when we have learnt to attend to it with consideration.