The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.

Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.

The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.

Science is, in the best and strictest sense, glorious entertainment

To delve into history entails, besides the grievance of hard work, the danger that in the depths one may lose one’s scapegoats.

Since in every European country between 1870 and 1914 there was a war party demanding armaments, an individualist party demanding ruthless competition, an imperialist party demanding a free hand over backward peoples, a socialist party demanding the conquest of power and a racialist party demanding internal purges against aliens - all of them, when appeals to greed and glory failed, invoked Spencer and Darwin, which was to say science incarnate.