In your reaction to an imagined attack on your country or an insult to its government, you draw closer to the herd for protection, you conform in word and deed, and you insist vehemently that everybody else shall think, speak, and act together. And you fix your adoring gaze upon the State, with a truly filial look, as upon the Father of the flock.

Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.

No matter what we have come through, or how many perils we have safely passed, or how many imperfect and jagged - in some places perhaps irreparably - our life has been, we cannot in our heart of hearts imagine how it could have been different. As we look back on it, it slips in behind us in orderly array, and, with all its mistakes, acquires a sort of eternal fitness, and even, at times, of poetic glamour.

With the shock of war the state comes into its own again.

We can easily become as much slaves to precaution as we can to fear.

Few people even scratch the surface, much less exhaust the contemplation of their own experience.

Culture, like the kingdom of heaven, lies within us, and not in foreign galleries and books.