I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.

In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.

The too perfect security of the Upper-worlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, a general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence.

When the mind grapples with a great and intricate problem, it makes its advances step by step, with but little realization of the gains it has made, until suddenly, with an effect of abrupt illumination, it realizes its victory.

The Athenian democracy suffered much from that narrowness of patriotism which is the ruin of all nations.

We can't have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It's a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.