The function of the imagination is not to make strange things settled, so much as to make settled things strange.

It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular.

It is the beginning of all true criticism of our time to realize that it has really nothing to say, at the very moment when it has invented so tremendous a trumpet for saying it.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

The highest and noblest thing that history can be is a good story.

Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.

If the common man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own.