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

You cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it.

It never occurred to him to be spiritually won over to the enemy. Many moderns, inured to a weak worship of intellect and force, might have wavered in their allegiance under this oppression of a great personality. . . . But this was a kind of modern meanness to which Syme could not sink even in his extreme morbidity. Like any man, he was coward enough to fear great force; but he was not coward enough to admire it.

If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.

One can no more have a private religion than one can have a private sun or a private moon.

Even in a minute instance, it is best to look first to the main tendencies of Nature. A particular flower may not be dead in early winter, but the flowers are dying; a particular pebble may never be wetted with the tide, but the tide is coming in. To the scientific eye all human history is a series of collective movements, destructions or migrations, like the massacre of flies in winter or the return of birds in spring.

How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.