Do you see any majority, anywhere, in this imperfect and irreligious world, admitting that the minority is precious? That any minority is precious?

Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.

The principle of fashion is . . . the principle of the kaleidoscope. A new year can only bring us a new combination of the same elements; and about once in so often we go back and begin again.

Each man's private conscience ought to be a nice little self-registering thermometer: he ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and explicitly within himself, and not care what the world thinks. The mass of human beings, however, are not made that way; and many people have been saved from crime or sin by the simple dislike of doing things they would not like to confess.

I have always, privately and humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word [as culture] should go out of the best vocabularies; for when you lose an abstract term, you are apt to lose the thing it stands for.

I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies.

Some of the men and women who will not say in so many words the thing which is not, will deliberately give a false impression. They are not the servants of truth; they are the parasites of truth.