Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.

The history of mankind for the last four centuries is rather like that of an imprisoned sleeper, stirring clumsily and uneasily while the prison that restrains and shelters him catches fire, not waking but incorporating the crackling and warmth of the fire with ancient and incongruous dreams, than like that of a man consciously awake to danger and opportunity.

There is no reason whatever to believe that the order of nature has any greater bias in favour of man than it had in favour of the ichthyosaur or the pterodactyl.

Mankind which began in a cave and behind a windbreak will end in the disease-soaked ruins of a slum.

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

In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.

About two-thirds of the face of Marx is beard, a vast solemn wooly uneventful beard that must have made all normal exercise impossible. It is not the sort of beard that happens to a man, it is a beard cultivated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the world.