It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.

History sometimes acts as madly as heredity, and her most unpredictable performances are often her most glorious.

Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.

I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.

There is nothing more frightening than the faces of people whom one does not know but who seem to know one, and be amused by one.

... when the Spaniards persecuted heretics they may have been crude, but they were not being unreasonable or unpractical. They were at least wiser than the people of to-day who pretend that it does not matter what a man believes, as who should say that the flavour and digestibility of a pudding will have nothing to do with its ingredients.

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.