The mind resorts to reason for want of training.

As for piracy, I love to be pirated. It is the greatest compliment an author can have. The wholesale piracy of Democracy was the single real triumph of my life. Anyone may steal what he likes from me.

Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.

History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.

In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.

One friend in a life-time is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim.

Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.