Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.

The whole art of the political speech is to put 'nothing' into it. It is much more difficult than it sounds.

Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world, which will shake off the domination of Europeans - still nominally Christian - and reappear as the prime enemy of our civilization? The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam.

There is no one who has cooked but has discovered that each particular dish depends for its rightness upon some little point which he is never told. It is not only so of cooking: it is so of splicing a rope; of painting a surface of wood; of mixing mortar; of almost anything you like to name among the immemorial human arts.

The machine does not control the mind of man, though it affects the mind of man; it is the mind of man that can and should control the machine.

All men have an instinct for conflict: at least, all healthy men.

For no one, in our long decline, So dusty, spiteful and divided, Had quite such pleasant friends as mine, Or loved them half as much as I did.