To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that is has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.

A critic is someone who enters the battlefield after the war is over and shoots the wounded.

There are things a man must not do even to save a nation.

The world of shabby gentility is like no other; its sacrifices have less logic, its standards are harsher, its relation to reality is dimmer than comfortable property or plain poverty can understand.

A revolution requires of its leaders a record of unbroken infallibility; if they do not possess it, they are expected to invent it.

Any experience deeply felt makes some men better and some men worse. When it has ended, they share nothing but the recollection of a commitment in which each was tested and to some degree found wanting. [...] The consequences of the journey change the voyager so much more than the embarking or the arrival.

It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.