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

Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.

He may be mad, but there's method in his madness. There nearly always is method in madness. It's what drives men mad, being methodical.

It is the friction of two spiritual things, of tradition and invention, or of substance and symbol, from which the mind takes fire. The creeds condemned as complex have something like the secret of sex; they can breed thoughts.

It was the mystical dogma of Bentham and Adam Smith and the rest, that some of the worst of human passions would turn out to be all for the best. It was the mysterious doctrine that selfishness would do the work of unselfishness.

Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.

I need not pause to explain that crime is not a disease. It is criminology that is a disease.