The Second World War took place not so much because no one won the First, but because the Versailles Treaty did not acknowledge this truth.

...the century's most radical vice... the notion that human beings can be shoveled around like concrete.

If we want foxes, to observe and delight in, we must have hunting.

Nothing appeals to intellectuals more than the feeling that they represent 'the people'. Nothing, as a rule, is further from the truth

Human beings are infinitely worth studying, especially the peculiarities that often go along with outstanding gifts.

Scanning the newspapers and absorbing with a mixture of incredulity and indignation the enormities they report, I conclude that what England lacks today is, quite simply, sense.

Bismarck had cunningly taught the parties not to aim at national appeal but to represent interests. They remained class or sectional pressure-groups under the Republic. This was fatal, for it made the party system, and with it democratic parliamentarianism, seem a divisive rather than a unifying factor. Worse: it meant the parties never produced a leader who appealed beyond the narrow limits of his own following.