A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it.

In a world where everything is ridiculous, nothing can be ridiculed. You cannot unmask a mask.

You can't have the family farm without the family.

Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.

But I was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did so; and it never seemed to mind.

The diseased pride [of artistic individualists] was not even conscious of a public interest, and would have found all political terms utterly tasteless and insignificant. It was no longer a question of one man one vote, but of one man one universe.