If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales.

There is no obligation on us to be richer, or busier, or more efficient, or more productive, or more progressive, or any way worldlier or wealthier, if it does not make us happier.

To be wrong, and to be carefully wrong, that is the definition of decadence.

Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.

The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.

The man who says, 'my country right or wrong' is like the man who says, 'my mother drunk or sober'

When people talk as if the Crusades were nothing more than an aggressive raid against Islam, they seem to forget in the strangest way that Islam itself was only an aggressive raid against the old and ordered civilization in these parts. I do not say it in mere hostility to the religion of Mahomet; I am fully conscious of many values and virtues in it; but certainly it was Islam that was the invasion and Christendom that was the thing invaded.