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

When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.

A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it.

An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old.

Education is the period during which you are being instructed by somebody you do not know, about something you do not want to know.

What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism.

"The Universe repeats itself, with the possible exception of history." Of all earthly studies history is the only one that does not repeat itself. ... Astronomy repeats itself; botany repeats itself; trigonometry repeats itself; mechanics repeats itself; compound long division repeats itself. Every sum if worked out in the same way at any time will bring out the same answer. ... A great many moderns say that history is a science; if so it occupies a solitary and splendid elevation among the sciences; it is the only science the conclusions of which are always wrong.