There's a lot of difference between listening and hearing.

Many clever men like you have trusted to civilization. Many clever Babylonians, many clever Egyptians, many clever men at the end of Rome. Can you tell me, in a world that is flagrant with the failures of civilisation, what there is particularly immortal about yours?

Free verse'? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch 'free architecture'.

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated.

The great saint may be said to mix all his thoughts with thanks. All goods look better when they look like gifts.

A man's minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative; the things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals. But with us the reverse is true; our views change constantly; but our lunch does not change. Now, I should like men to have strong and rooted conceptions, but as for their lunch, let them have it sometimes in the garden, sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes in the top of a tree. Let them argue from the same first principles, but let them do it in a bed, or a boat, or a balloon.

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