People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

It is the decisive people who have become civilised; it is the indecisive, otherwise called the higher sceptics, or the idealistic doubters, who have remained barbarians.

Democracy is reproached with saying that the majority is always right. But progress says that the minority is always right.

Sometimes he even embarrassed the company by phrases suggesting that there was some difference between a Liberal and a Conservative.

Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.

[There is] one distinctly human thing - the story. There can be as good science about a turnip as about a man. ... [Or philosophy, or theology] ...There can be, without any question at all, as good higher mathematics about a turnip as about a man. But I do not think, though I speak in a manner somewhat tentative, that there could be as good a novel written about a turnip as a man.