We can’t turn life into a pleasure. But we can choose such pleasures as are worthy of us and our immortal souls.

I would rather a boy learnt in the roughest school the courage to hit a politician, or gained in the hardest school the learning to refute him - rather than that he should gain in the most enlightened school the cunning to copy him.

The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice.

Leisure is being allowed to do nothing.

...but out of the desert, from the dry places and the dreadful suns, come the cruel children of the lonely God; the real Unitarians who with scimitar in hand have laid waste the world. For it is not well for God to be alone.

The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are.

All real democracy is an attempt like that of a jolly hostess to bring the shy people out.