The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

Martyrdom is the only path to immortality that requires no talent whatsoever.

You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.

No child should be brought up to suppose that its food and clothes come down from heaven or are miraculously conjured from empty space by papa. Loathsome as we have made the idea of duty (like the idea of work) we must habituate children to a sense of repayable obligation to the community for what they consume and enjoy, and inculcate the repayment as a point of honor.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

Any belief worth having must survive doubt

It is always necessary to overstate a cast startlingly to make people sit up and listen to it, and to frighten them into acting on it.