Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch.

The modern world... has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.

An enormous amount of modern ingenuity is expended on finding defences for the indefensible conduct of the powerful. As I have said above, these defences generally exhibit themselves most emphatically in the form of appeals to physical science. And of all the forms in which science, or pseudo-science, has come to the rescue of the rich and stupid, there is none so singular as the singular invention of the theory of races.

The doctrine of human equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid.

Aristocracy: government by the badly educated.

It is the root of all religion that a man knows that he is nothing in order to thank God that he is something.