Were I to go down into the market-place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, 'In your lifetime, have you known peace?' wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father, and ask him the same question, and transform him in his turn to his father, I would never hear the word 'Yes,' if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. I would always hear, 'No, there was fear, there were our enemies without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death.

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.

She did not suddenly start being disagreeable this afternoon, she was so good at it, she had evidently practised whatever are the scales and arpeggios of rudeness every day of her life.

There is no wider gulf in the universe than yawns between those on the hither and thither side of vital experience.

There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time.

Most magazines have that look of being predestined to be left which one sees on the faces of the women whose troubles bring them to the Law Courts.

Getting a divorce is nearly always as cheerful and useful an occupation as breaking valuable china.