We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one's life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.

Boys like romantic tales; but babies like realistic tales-because they find them romantic.

How quickly revolutions grow old; and, worse still, respectable.

We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.

I am not fighting a hopeless fight. People who have fought in real fights don't, as a rule.

The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.

Latter-day scepticism is fond of calling itself progressive; but scepticism is really reactionary. Scepticism goes back; it attempts to unsettle what has already been settled. Instead of trying to break up new fields with its plough, it simply tries to break up the plough.