A friend in power is a friend lost.

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.

The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting together in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.

A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians.

As a historian, he felt it his duty to respect everything that had ever been respected, except for the occasional statesman.

The capacity of women to make unsuitable marriages must be considered as the cornerstone of society.

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