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

The coziness between church and state is good for the state and bad for the church

Suppose, my dear Chadd, suppose it is we who are the idiots because we are not afraid of devils in the dark?

Humility is the luxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing or a large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all the cosmic things are what they really are - of immeasurable stature.

They hate kings, they hate priests, they hate soldiers, they hate sailors. They distrust men of science, they denounce the middle classes, they despair of working men, but they adore humanity. Only they always speak of humanity as if it were a curious foreign nation. They are dividing themselves more and more from men to exalt the strange race of mankind. They are ceasing to be human in the effort to be humane.

Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.

If we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse.