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.

The reason teaching has to go on is that children are not born human; they are made so.

The nation in arms is virtually a communist state: the people must be paid wages and fed and protected and regimented behind the lines as much as on the front. Minds must be kept loyal and at the right pitch of hate, so that successive drafts of fighters are accepted without murmurings. Letters and newspapers must be censored while the propaganda mill grinds on. As for decisions of strategy and overall command, they must please many masters: dissenters in the cabinet, the heads of the allied states and public opinion. Hence failures must be disguised or concealed.

Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.

Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.

The intellectuals' chief cause of anguish are one another's works.

Since it is seldom clear whether intellectual activity denotes a superior mode of being or a vital deficiency, opinion swings between considering intellect a privilege and seeing it as a handicap