We have not made cricket and football [soccer] professional because of any astonishing avarice or new vulgarity. We have made them professional because we would have them perfect. We have dedicated men to them as to some god of inhuman excellence. We care more for football than for the fun of playing football.

In the modern conflict between the Smile and the Laugh, I am all in favor of laughing. The recent stage of culture and criticism might very well be summed up as the men who smile criticizing the men who laugh.

It is human to err; and the only final and deadly error, among all our errors, is denying that we have ever erred.

All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.

A nation that has nothing but its amusements will not be amused for long.

It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them.

No man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.