No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.

The new American, like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of the twelfth century was the servant of the Church.

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. The imagination must be given not wings but weights.

Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.

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

The idea that any personal deity could find pleasure or profit in torturing a poor woman, by accident, with a fiendish cruelty known to man only in perverted and insane temperaments, could not be held for a moment. For pure blasphemy, it made pure atheism a comfort.

Politics, as a practise, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.