The past is democratic, because it is a people. The future is despotic, because it is a caprice. Every man is alone in his prediction, just as each man is alone in a dream.

The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.

For they (capitalists) hold as their chief heresy, in a coarser form, the fundamental falsehood that things are not made to be used but made to be sold. All the collapse of their commercial system in their own time has been due to that fallacy of forcing things on a market where there was no market; of continually increasing the power of supply without increasing the power of demand; of briefly, of always considering the man who sells the potato and never considering the man who eats it.

The Byzantines hammered away at their hard and orthodox symbols, because they could not be in a mood to believe that men could take a hint. The moderns drag out into lengths and reels of extravagance their new orthodoxy of being unorthodox, because they also cannot give a hint -- or take a hint. Yet all perfect and well-poised art is really a hint.

The men of the East may spell the stars, And times and triumphs mark, But the men signed of the cross of Christ Go gaily in the dark.

Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.

The past is democratic, because it is a people. The future is despotic, because it is a caprice. Every man is alone in his prediction, just as each man is alone in a dream.