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

...fact takes no heed of human hopes.

It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us.

After telephone, kinematograph and phonograph had replaced newspaper, book schoolmaster and letter, to live outside the range of the electric cables was to live an isolated savage.

We're in a blessed drainpipe, and we've got to crawl along it till we die.

There is no remorse like a remorse of chess. It is a curse upon man. There is no happiness in chess.

Nothing endures, nothing is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable marginal inexactitude which is the mysterious inmost quality of Being